ANOTHER SIGN OF REAL ESTATE MARKET COOLING
Until recently, if you put a house on the market in the Denver area, multiple offers would come flowing in. Now, only 20 percent of homes draw that kind of interest.
The days when a home in metro Denver would list on the market and set off a feeding frenzy that brought in multiple offers are fading.
While lower-priced properties in good shape can still garner stronger interest, a declining share of homes receives multiple offers, according to statistics from Seattlebased real estate brokerage Redfin.
Redfin tracks the number of offers received on transactions where it represents the buyers. A year ago in June, half of all sales in metro Denver came with multiple offers. But at the start of this year, the ratio was down to one in five.
And in June it was down to 12.3 percent, or about one in eight homes sold. That is on par with the 12.2 percent rate seen nationally.
“Bidding wars are few and far between this season. They are reserved for homes that are priced relatively low and are in good shape or homes in hot areas that are priced correctly,” said Andy Potarf, a Redfin senior agent in Denver.
That partly reflects the more abundant choices that buyers have. At the end of June, there were 9,520 homes listed for sale in metro Denver, up 28 percent from a year earlier and the highest inventory available since October 2013, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
And it looks like there may be fewer buyers in the market. Another survey Redfin conducts of where visitors to its website search shows metro Denver home shoppers are increasingly looking to buy outside the area, in places such as Colorado Springs and Seattle, and that fewer people outside metro Denver are looking to buy a home here.
But lower interest rates do have the potential to boost demand and competition, especially in the most affordable neighborhoods, notes Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather.
“At Redfin, we’ve been seeing increases in the numbers of homebuyers starting their searches and going on home tours following the latest mortgage rate drops,” Fairweather said in the report.
It’s also important for sellers to put the right bait on the hook from the start. Another Redfin study from May found that a home that starts with a hundred views on its first day on the market gets only 17 views
on average a month in.
After a price cut, the number of views shoots up to 29. But that bump lasts only a day, before views quickly drop back down to 18 a day.
Sellers can’t price their homes above the most recent sales in their neighborhood and then sit back and wait for a bidding war to start, Potarf said.
“Homes have to be upgraded and priced competitively or maybe even slightly below market to garner more attention,” he said. Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or @aldosvaldi