Welcome/The January Market

Welcome to the first post on The Yacovetta Collection's official website. It took too long for this site to come to be, but I'm glad it's here. I hope you find it useful in one way or another. Here at the beginning, there will be plenty of tweaks, additions, subtractions, and changes. I hope you don't find them to be too disruptive while I learn to navigate the tools, features, and uses.

Getting straight to the point, let's dive into January's real estate market, and synthesize some data to figure out what it means for you.

At the end of January, there were 7,688 homes available for sale in the Denver Metro area. This represents the most inventory I've seen in January in my career. Most real estate agents will look at this number and say "buyer's market" without thinking about what this number means.

The caveat to this amount of inventory, is that it's mostly shit; horrendous houses that are over-priced by sellers who are chasing a market and a buyer who just don't exist anymore litter the landscape of the metro market. I would estimate that roughly half of the active inventory on the market falls into one of two categories: overpriced and stubborn, or previously expired listings returning to the market. Those homes returning to the market are the result of strategic decisions at the end of last year. If your home is priced correctly and presented well to the buying public, but is not selling, it's simply bad timing. A common strategy in those instances is to expire the listing for 30+ days, and put it back on the market as a new listing.

The other half of the inventory, the not-shit half, feels like its own independent sellers' market. The best houses, priced below market value, staged, cleaned, painted, updated, and presented as pieces of art to the buying public are attracting all of the able buyers. In many cases, multiple buyers are submitting offers on these homes, driving the purchase price up above market value. This explains how, despite affordability issues and stubbornly high interest rates, the average detached single family home in Denver costs $770,000. That's roughly 5% more than last year. That's $35,000 in equity growth, and more than I made as a first-year teacher.

If you're a buyer still waiting for prices or interest rates to come down, you're going to continue to be frustrated. There is no substantial relief coming to interest rates in the foreseeable future, and the moment that rates do go down, lots of pent up demand will re-enter the market and there will be even more competition for the best inventory available for sale. This is not meant to scare you away from purchasing; the Denver market builds wealth. But the short-term pain of entering this market as a buyer is real, and expectations should be set accordingly.