Denver bucks national trend in investor home purchases

interesting article...from Denver Business Journal...Denver defied a national trend in January by seeing a big uptick in the number of institutional investors buying homes here, according to a new RealtyTrac report. Nationally, the share of institutional investor purchases in January hit a 22-month low of 5.2 percent of all home purchases. In Denver, however, the share of institutional investor purchases rose 21 percent to 8.2 percent. Metro Denver also saw a 7 percent increase in residential home sales overall in January from the same month last year, with 70,758 sales, and a 10 percent year-over-year jump in the median sales price to $236,000. “The Denver metro area did not experience the typical winter slowdown that many markets across the country experienced and we continue to be very busy,” said Chad Ochsner, owner of Re/Max Alliance, covering the Denver market. “Our January year-over-year sales counts are up about 7 percent, which is really encouraging. I think it has a lot to do with improved consumer confidence and low interest rates.” The report also showed that short sales and foreclosure-related sales nationally — including both sales to third-party buyers at the public foreclosure auction and sales of bank-owned properties — accounted for a combined 17.5 percent of all U.S. residential sales in January, down from 18.7 percent a year ago. “Many have anticipated that the large institutional investors backed by private equity would start winding down their purchases of homes to rent, and the January sales numbers provide early evidence this is happening,” said Daren Blomquist, RealtyTrac vice president. “It’s unlikely that this pullback in purchasing is weather-related given that there were increases in the institutional investor share of purchases in colder-weather markets such as Denver and Cincinnati, even while many warmer-weather markets in Florida and Arizona saw substantial decreases in the share of institutional investors from a year ago.”