If you were going to bet on a real estate market to come back, sooner and not later...The Denver Real Estate Market has the statistics to lead the way out.
According to HousingTracker.net, the below charts show the continued improving housing market in the Metro Denver area. Single Family and Condo inventory is down 22% and prices are up 20%. This works in conjunction with reports from The Urban Land Institute as having Denver in it's top ten markets nationwide as well as in it's emerging Trends Real Estate 2009, dated October 21, 2008:
- Houston. Stays relatively strong as long as energy stays hot. It makes the top ten for the first time since 1995. Office vacancies drop to 10 percent, “a good buy opportunity,” but apartments soften. Cheap land results in cheap housing, and prices have not gone up dramatically.
- Boston. Job outlook is more favorable than most cities, with office space “tight” in the Financial District and the Back Bay area. New “harborside hotels threaten older product.”
- Denver. The state capital has a major federal government presence, which should buffer job losses. Steady population growth and broadening diversification of the industry keeps the housing market stable. Mass transit should pay future dividends.
- Dallas. Compares favorably to other “hot-growth” markets. Although office vacancies downtown are 20 percent or higher, apartments do well and developers keep building single-family homes.
- Chicago. Apartments do well, but condos weaken as speculators leave the market. Office vacancies are in the low teens, and O’Hare International Airport keeps industrial space in the “global pathway.
Here are the Urban Land Institute ratings for Metro Denver Commercial properties. Commercial/multi-family investment, No. 10; commercial/multifamily
development, N0.21; for-sale homebuilding, No. 21; office properties,
No. 8; hotels, No. 11; and industrial,
no. 10.
Notice how all the above categories had to do with ROOFS OVER OUR HEADS? The only coming "softening markets" in Denver, will be in some Commercial sectors, mostly retail... will be heading towards the skids in 2009...I ask myself, "how many Tokyo Joe's, dry cleaners and nail salons does the average consumer need?" People who specialize in Commercial real estate forget that the number of human beings in the Denver Metro area needing a roof over their heads has increased and not decreased. We hardly need any more of any commercial retail or office real estate!
Now let's illustrate that real estate is local! The above charts give a 50,000 foot view, so let's take a look at what this really means to the man on the street. Total Housing units, sold, under $200K located in Cherry Creek School district, city of Aurora.
From 1/1/08 to 12/1/08
Total Sold 920 (83.63 per month pace)
Avg List Price 156,353
Avg Sold Price 140,144
Avg Sold to List 89.63%
Avg DOM 76.98 days
From 1/1/08 thru 5/31/08
Total Sold 430 (86 per month pace)
Avg List Price 157,148
Avg Sold Price 141,709
Avg Sold to List 90.17%
Avg DOM 83.10
From 6/1/08 thru 12/1/08
Total Sold 460 (76.66 per month pace)
Avg List Price 155,656
Avg Sold Price 138,771
Avg List to Sold 89.15%
Avg DOM 71.61
From 10/1/08 thru 12/1/08
Total Sold 107 (53.5 per month pace)
Avg List Price 157,510
Avg Sold Price 139,877
Avg List to Sold 88.8%
Avg DOM 63.16
Ok and now compare to last year at this time. Despite the press, despite the stock market and despite people who don't know how to obtain data. Prices are UP, and Days on the market are down. The decrease in inventory is having the effect that it should..more demand. More demand means higher pricing and fewer days to sell.
From 10-1-07 thru 12-1-07
155 Sold
Avg List Price 146,969
Avg Sold Price 135,264
Avg Sold to List 92%
Avg DOM 79.49
As we wind our way towards an election between the professional liars that have been "chosen" as candidates for U.S. President, it seems to be a great time to remind us all about the issue being routinely ignored by virtually everyone . To what issue am I referring? The national debt, of course.
How do you annoy everybody? That’s simple: Explain the national debt.
Americans don’t want to hear about the national debt. It’s like a family living paycheck to paycheck, maxed out on their credit cards, trying to pretend the collection notices are all being lost in the mail. They don’t want to admit they have no ability to actually pay off the debt they’ve incurred by pursuing a flambuoyant lifestyle, blowing wads of cash on high-priced wines, luxury vehicles, and an occasional line of coke — they desperately want to imagine they can keep living on money that appears from nowhere, regardless of how much they owe to everybody else and the fact that their incomes don’t even come close to matching their expenditures.
Too bad every household in America doesn’t have its own Federal Reserve, huh? If it did, we could all just print money to pay off our debt, save our skins, and ignore the fundamentals of economics. But even in Washington today (and New York), the Federal Reserve is too busy bailing out greedy, criminally-operated banks to turn much attention to the much larger issue of the United States’ national debt. Apparently, saving the banks is more important than anything else, and the Fed is now committed to destroying the U.S. dollar through runaway hyperinflation in order to prevent a few rich bankers from facing the consequences of their outrageous sub-prime lending sprees.
The only reason it’s been able to operate for this long is because other nations and foreign central banks have been foolish enough to keep lending the U.S. government more money. It’s like giving cash to a crack addict and hoping he will somehow seek out a drug rehab center on his own.
This is the person who never gets a job, never makes an honest living, but yet somehow manages to hit up everybody else for cash.
America borrows cash from the central banks around the world.
Don’t dare explain the national debt to anyone but try to explain the simple workings of finance, debt and economics to the uninformed, and you’ll be accused of being a doomsayer, a pessimist, or — the worst insult in today’s fear-based society — unpatriotic! How dare you point out the economic truths that will soon bring this country’s federal government to its knees! Such blatant truths shall not be tolerated… especially not in a country whose entire financial system is based on a cascade of fictional financial instruments propped up by nothing more than wishful thinking and Enron-style accounting fraud.
Let me translate all this for you in serious terms: The United States is already broke. The Federal Reserve is destroying the currency. The U.S. dollar will soon be virtually worthless. There is no saving the dollar, and there’s no saving the savings of any U.S. citizen foolish enough to be holding dollars when the music stops. The Federal Reserve has already decided to do anything in its power to save the rich bankers; even if it means destroying the value of all the dollars held by hard-working Americans. The day will come, folks, when your savings accounts will all be “recalibrated” and you’ll be given ten cents on the dollar while the Fed slinks away with 90% of your savings, using it to bail out overpaid bank owners.
And the federal government? Under a long string of presidential crooks — Democratic and Republican alike — it has decided to pursue a dangerous experiment called, “What happens if we never pay our debtors while running up more debt?” That experiment, not surprisingly, will end in the financial demise of this nation. (But there’s good news: A new, better system may emerge from the dust of the greenback… keep reading…)
You can’t defy the laws of gravity… nor economics.
These aren’t careless predictions, by the way. These are simple observations the follow the fundamentals. Why are the nations of the world fleeing the U.S. Treasury debt auctions? Why are dollars increasingly worthless everywhere except in the United States itself? The answer is because the Fed is hyperinflating the currency to save the banks, even while the government is snorting yet more crack and spending unprecedented levels of increasingly-worthless dollars on drugs and war (or, as they call it, “medication and defense”).
Dollars cannot be created out of nothing with zero impact on peoples’ savings; You cannot believe that the U.S. government is wise enough to avert financial disaster. These are the hopes of the deluded. These are precisely the ramblings of Enron’s accountants before the crash, or dot-com stock pushers before that crash. They’re the slobbering blatherings of all the people who said housing prices will never fall, and therefore everyone will get rich off the never-ending housing price booms!
It’s like observing gravity. If you toss something into the air, you can be confident it’s going to come falling back to the ground. You don’t have to “predict” gravity; it’s a law of the universe. It works by itself, like clockwork, regardless of what you want it do to (I’m ignoring near-light speed travel, relativity, quantum physics, and all that fun stuff for the purposes of this metaphor, by the way, for those readers who are physicists). Likewise, when you see a nation throw its dollars into the air, spending its way to oblivion, ignoring its debt and ramping up its spending to even higher levels, it doesn’t take much of a prediction to know that it’s all going to fall back to the ground in a grand economic collapse.
So I’m not even calling the coming collapse of the U.S. government a “prediction.” It’s just common sense. It’s as obvious as gravity. If you don’t believe me, do the math. There is no mathematical solution to the current financial crisis facing not merely the banks and the currency, but the federal government itself. The only unknown factor is WHEN things will happen. Can the Fed help the economy limp along in a state of near-collapse for another year? Perhaps. Five years? Maybe. Ten years? I doubt it. Now for the good news: The good news is that the U.S. federal government will eventually go bankrupt. Yes, that’s the good news! Because after the financial chaos passes (which will not be fun, believe me), we have a chance to create a new society, a new currency and a new, honest system of government that actually represents the People for a change. The current cabal of corruption and criminal behavior that sits in Washington and pretends to protect the interests of the voters is about to find itself on the receiving end of an angry mob. The 200+ year experiment called The United States of America is in its final chapter. But out of its failure, we can learn important lessons. We can learn things that will help us create a better future society. Lessons like:
• Never let a private company (the Federal Reserve) control the money supply.
Never Audited-pays no taxes-owners undisclosed-unconstitutional since 1913
• Never let “representative” legislators vote in your place. Insist on a DIRECT Democracy in the next society. (We don’t need Senators and Congresspeople, folks. The whole concept is long since outdated, and most Senators and Congresspeople are crooks.)
• Never let a government abandon the gold standard for its currency. If you do, that government will inevitably hyperinflate the currency and leave the people broke.
• Never let corporations run the government. If you do, your government will become a branch of the corporations, and the regulators (like the FDA, USDA, etc.) will become agents of corporate-sponsored terrorism that abandon all ethics and destroy the health and safety of the People.
• Never allow the centralization of power in one branch of government. For example, do not allow the creation of Executive Orders we’ve seen signed by the President.
• Never allow one man (the President) to commit acts of war. Didn’t we learn this after Vietnam?
• Never allow people from industry to take jobs in the government where they become biased, pro-corporate pushers of everything from pharmaceuticals to beef.
• Never allow politicians to censor scientists.
• Never allow the population to be dumbed-down through sub-standard public schools that only raise a generation of obedient workers, not skeptical thinkers.
• Never allow the media to control the population through advertiser-supported propaganda and violent programming.
• Never allow politicians to destroy citizens’ rights. When they attempt to do so, march on your capitol (in a non-violent way, of course). Arrest the politicians. Prosecute them for crimes against the People.
• Never allow corporate lobbyists to have access to lawmakers. If you do, you’ll end up with a corrupt government that only protects corporations, not the People.
• Never allow your government to operate in secret, with secret prisons, secret wiretapping laws and secret war “evidence” that is never made public. Secrecy breeds corruption. Honest societies do not need to conduct their judicial processes in secret.
• Never allow corporations to play God with the food supply by genetically modifying the crops.
• Never allow corporations to be granted intellectual property ownership over seeds, genes, animals and medicines. If you do, you will one day wake up impoverished, “homeless on the continent your fathers conquered,” to quote Jefferson.
• Never allow banks to operate on a fractional reserve system of loans (40-1) and money creation that’s just begging for a series of cascading failures.
… I could go on, but you get the point. We have learned some very tough lessons over the last 200+ years, and once this present government collapses, it is crucial that we apply those lessons in creating a new system that abandons tyranny and embraces genuine freedom. We will have this opportunity soon. Many Americans will lose their life savings on the journey towards this new opportunity, but if we maintain our collective vision of a brighter future society, I believe we can create something much better out of the ashes of this failed experiment called the United States of America. Please note: In no way do I support violence of any kind in creating a new society in the aftermath of this current one. I only support collaboration, openness, freedom and great respect for all living creatures as well as our sacred planet Earth. I believe the passing of this failed government is a blessing, not a curse, and I believe the collapse of the U.S. dollar will ultimately help awaken many to the tough but rewarding decisions that will face us all in the very near future. We must consciously decide to take back our freedoms, our rights and our futures from a system of corporate and government control that has destroyed our planet, exploited our people, and stolen our savings. But if can make the rights decisions based on creating a more promising future for our children, then the rewards will be unimaginable.
We the People hold the power to create a new society based on the freedoms and promises once held sacred in this land. Be ready to play your role, a constructive role, in the aftermath of this current society. And do not be surprised when gravity kicks in and this entire fictional government charade comes crashing down along with the fractional reserve banking system, the criminal Federal Reserve, the war-mongering politicians and the endless, endless debt. There is no way out now other than collapse and rebirth.
I can’t say when it will come, or exactly how it will play out. I only urge us all to remain positive, informed and constructive. The coming chaos will be painful in the short term, but out of the ashes of a failed society, we can work together to rebuilt a new one based on real freedom, honest money, sensible medicine and limited government.