Surprising gains on the Plains
from R CLCO, a real e state r esearch firm, found that more affluent younger adults preferred to have second homes in downtown a reas o ver mountain r esorts, v iewing them as a better long- term investment.
“More people aged 35 to 44 preferred a city location,” said Caroline Flax Ganz, a real estate economist at RCLCO in Washington, D. C. As younger generations accumulate more wealth, they could gravitate towards downtown properties and bypass r esort areas.
They w ere looking at u sing downtown residences for weekend stays and viewed them as better investments in terms of rental income than mountain and beach areas, Ganz said on a press call Thursday.
Summarizing the last f our years as mountain resorts hot, dense urban areas not and everywhere else somewhere in between is an oversimplification.
The Zillow d ata contained some surprises. After Edwards, the area c losest t o doubling i ts home v alues was Kit Carson i n Cheyenne County with a 98.6% gain in the past four years.
Las Animas i n Bent C ounty was up 73.5%, making the ninth spot out of 401 ZIP codes tracked for pandemic price appreciation. Mcclave, i n the same c ounty, saw home prices up 70.4%, while Cheyenne Wells, about an hour south of Kit Carson, was up 67.1%.
About half o f the ZIP codes on the Plains had too few transactions to a llow Zillow to track them, especially i n Colorado’s highly d istressed southeastern corner.
But when enough sales information w as a vailable, housing markets on the E astern P lains outperformed t hose a long the northern Front Range.
And that outperformance has accelerated in the past year. Of the top five performing ZIP codes on a one- year basis, three were on the Plains, led by Kit Carson and Eads. Kirk in Yuma County has joined the home appreciation party in fifth place.
The pursuit of a ffordability seems like the most reasonable explanation, a nd t he E astern Plains a re s tarting from much lower price points.
Even after almost doubling, the typical home price in Kit Carson only r eached $ 141,592 in January, according to its Zillow Home Price Index.
In Las Animas, typical homes were s till going for $ 91,377, the only C olorado ZIP code i n the study still below $ 100,000. That’s a far cry from Woody Creek outside Aspen, the state leader with a typical home value of just under $ 4.4 million. Boulder’s 80304 ZIP is the leader along the Front Range at $ 1.4 million.
“We hear from a lot of people selling their homes on the Front Range trying t o find a c heaper property,” said Brock Reedy, an associate broker with Wilson Realty in Lamar.
In Lamar, Zillow pegs the typical home at $ 165,749, even after a 53.4% increase in the past four years. Brock adds that $ 200,000 can buy a nice home in L amar with some land, while it won’t even “buy a bedroom” in downtown Denver.
“We have h ad q uite a f ew folks coming out from the Front Range,” said Virgil George, a managing broker at the Rocking X Land Co. in Burlington near the Kanas border.
Retirees not dependent on job opportunities a nd l ooking f or a calmer pace of life are among those trading city life for affordable country living.
Rocking X recently s old two homes where the buyers signed on the dotted line without ever touring in person, George said.
Buyers working in metro Denver and Colorado Springs pushed up prices in Bennett, Strasburg, Limon and Hugo, trading affordability for a long c ommute b efore t he p andemic. B ut L imon and Hugo saw some of the smaller gains among the Plains ZIPS in the past four years.
George remains skeptical of the Zillow numbers, even though his brokerage has had a strong run despite higher interest rates. For starters, few homes switch hands out on the Plains and new construction is rare, meaning just a few sales can push the percentage change way up.
Call him a skeptic, but George isn’t ready to c all Cheyenne County Colorado’s hottest housing market, even if Zillow said Kit Carson led the state for home price appreciation last year and was in s econd place over f our years.