Metro Denver home sales jump 32% from 2012

from DenverPost.com

Buyers scooped up 6,104 metro Denver area homes in July, up 32 percent from the same month last year, according to a Metrolist Inc. report Monday.

That number of single-family homes and condos sold in July also was 10 percent higher than the 5,566 sold in June, the report states. June and July are typically the highest sales volume months for metro Denver’s home resale market.

At the same time, the inventory of for-sale homes in July grew 9 percent from the prior month, to 10,025. That’s the fourth month in a row the inventory of for-sale homes grew, but it’s still down 7 percent from the 10,827 homes for sale in July 2012.

“While still very competitive, the market in Denver seems to be growing at a sustainable pace,” said Kirby Slunaker, Metrolist’s CEO and president. “Inventory increases within the last 90 days are providing a stabilizing factor for the market overall.”

As indicated by a national report by the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Prices Index last week, the average sales price of metro Denver area home continued to increase year over year. According to the new Metrolist report, that average stood at $315,150 in July. Alhough that's a 1 percent drop from June’s $318,541 average, it’s 9 percent higher than the July 2012 average.

“As we review the details of the statistics we continue to see segments of the market that are more competitive than others,” Slunaker said. “Certainly the upper levels of the market continue to remain very hot with the entry level of the market being more impacted by changing interest rates and slim inventory availability.”

The average number of days on the market it took to sell a metro Denver home dropped to 37, down from the 43-day average set in June and from the 65-day average set in July 2012.

There were 7,406 homes put under contract, flat from June but up 43 percent from the 5,236 put under contract in July 2012.

Metrolist of Greenwood Village is metro Denver’s Multiple Listing Service, a database of home sales activity for real estate professionals.