Ahhh… our little buddy up to the North got named best real estate market in the USA.  Congratulations to the People’s Republic of Boulder!  While folks are talking doom and gloom around the country I’m happy to see Colorado’s economy holding strong.

By Prashant Gopal, BusinessWeek

They’re easy to overlook, with home prices plunging from Manhattan to Los Angeles and almost everywhere in between. But look at the smaller metros where housing bubbles never took shape, and you’ll find some of today’s strongest markets.

Boulder, Colo.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Pittsburgh; Little Rock; and other slow-but-steady metros are now among the nation’s safest markets, and many of the homes in those markets continue to appreciate, if only modestly.

These are metro areas “where folks didn’t bake 10% to 12% increases into their financial expectations,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist at real estate site Zillow.com. “That was a good expectation to have.”

Working with data from Zillow.com, BusinessWeek came up with the strongest housing markets by ranking metro areas based on the share of single-family homes in which values rose in the second quarter compared with the second quarter of 2008. In the top-ranked metro, Boulder, an affluent Denver suburb that is home of the University of Colorado at Boulder, 59.39% of homes appreciated during the past year, and the median home value rose 2.12% on a year-over-year basis.

No. 1: Beautiful Boulder

Boulder was one of several college towns on the list, which also included a few military towns such as Fayetteville, N.C., and Jacksonville, N.C. Both government and university jobs have been relatively reliable during this recession. Affordability also seems to be a plus in this economy. Oklahoma City; Tulsa; Binghamton, N.Y.; Springfield, Ohio; Cumberland, Md.; and most other metros on the list have median home prices below $200,000 (some are under $100,000).

Boulder has several factors working in its favor. The town has controlled growth by putting limits on development and by acquiring more than 50,000 acres of open space for a greenbelt that surrounds the town. With the boundary of the Rocky Mountains to the west, the supply of new homes has been restricted.

Boulder’s economy and housing market have slowed, but the University of Colorado provides jobs and a steady flow of tenants for the area’s many rental homes. Demand for housing is also strong in part because the area is so pretty, said Tom Thibodeau, global real estate capital markets professor at the University of Colorado.

“Every year 5,000 undergraduates enter, and they don’t want to leave when they graduate,” Thibodeau said.

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