Denver Housing Prices

Monday, April 11 2005 - 0 Comments

Just over a year ago I decided to write a little Perl script that would "scrape" www.realtor.com (the main Realtor site for the US) and return to me the 25th, 50th (the median), and 75th percentile home prices for a given locale. It was pretty easy to do; the website already tells you how many homes are for sale in any given locale and then sorts the list by ascending price. All I needed to do was figure out which homes represented the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile by checking the price of the (.25 * #homes), (.5 * #homes), and (.75 * #homes) respectively (#homes is the total number of homes in the list).

I started keeping track of these prices as well as the number of homes for sale for Denver and a couple of other cities in March of 2004. Now that a year has gone by, I thought I'd share what I've seen for Denver.

For 3/30/2004 I recorded that www.realtor.com listed 7374 single family homes (not condos) for sale. The median price was $224,900. A year later on 3/28/2005 6445 homes were for sale in the Denver area and the median price was $224,000. In short, it's been a go nowhere year for real estate in Denver.

Over roughly the same time period, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reported that Denver housing prices appreciated 4.18% putting us at 47th in the nation. The difference between my estimates and theirs could be attributed to a number of things (e.g. they track selling price, I'm tracking asking price), but for all intents and purposes both measures are saying that the Denver market is pretty slow. I think people here already knew that.

You can view all the data I have between March 2004 and March 2005 for single family homes in Denver here.

Posted by Ben at April 11, 2005 08:25 PM

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