Forbes Magazine Rates Denver Best City to Buy a Home

Posted on June 23, 2009

Posted by Ryan Penn, Denver Realtor:

The positive news for the Denver Real Estate Market keeps rolling in. This week Forbes Magazine named Denver the Best City to Buy a Home,with Los Angeles, Boston, Phoenix, and San Diego Rounding out the top 5. Using a complex formula that rates cities based on current market activity and long-term market value, Forbes put Denver at #1. This news came right on the heels of Today Show Real Estate Expert Barbara Corcoran listing Denver as the #1 Real Estate Market on the way to recovery. Following are the results:

1. Denver, Colo.

PPSF Increase or Decrease: March 2009 vs. Feb. 2009: 5.7%

Transaction Increase or Decrease: March 2009 vs. March 2008: -8.4%

Percentage of ZIP Codes with 25% of Sales: 25%

Bottom line, savvy investors have been scooping up Denver Real Estate for the last 9 months. The rest of the nation has finally caught on.

“Denver has better growth potential than most cities today” says Christopher Cornell, an economist at Economy.com.

Search for Denver Lofts for Sale

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From the Forbes.com Article, Best Cities to Buy a Home:

While the overall housing market isn’t on the upswing, these metros show long-term promise.

Denver tops the list. It had 25% of its property sales occur within approximately 25% of the city’s ZIP codes. This means sales in various parts of the city were fairly evenly distributed, showing proportionate activity. The further a city deviates from the 25% mark, the less evenly distributed the market is in that city, and thus the lower that city ranks.

“Denver scores very well in terms of being able to bring people into a stable housing market,” says Christopher Cornell, an economist at Moody’s ( MCO – news – people ) Economy.com says. “It has better growth potential than most cities today.”

Cornell attributes Denver’s stability to its main industries–energy and technology–that he says aren’t likely to decline simultaneously. He also says its housing market didn’t grow as much as in other parts of the country over the last five years. “Little boom, little bust,” he says.

Behind The Numbers:
To determine which cities feature the best real estate deals, we looked at three sets of data in the March 2009 RPX Monthly Housing Market Report, distributed by Radar Logic Incorporated, a New York-based derivatives firm. It looks at the market fundamentals in the country’s 25 most populated metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs or metros), geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget used by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. First, we examined the number of ZIP codes with 25% of the area’s sales to determine those in which activity is most evenly distributed. Next, we examined increase and decrease in price per square footage to determine where market value is the highest. Last, we looked at transaction rates in each city to determine where the housing markets are most active. We scored each city by category, and then combined the scores to determine the final ranking.

You can read the rest of this article here.