Forecast predicts drop in Denver-area home prices in 2019

Research firm projects declines of more than 30%

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DENVER — A real estate data company projects Denver’s hot housing market will start to cool off in late 2019, with home prices in some areas dropping more than 30 percent.

Location, Inc., a geographic research and data mining company, said it used more than 200 variables to predict housing trends in Denver, Boulder, Greeley, and Ft. Collins.

The firm found an average drop in housing prices of 9.3 percent over the next five years for those areas, starting in late 2019.

A company spokesman said the declines were tied, in part, to wages not keeping up with home prices.

The Boulder Metro area fared the worst with a predicted 17 percent drop, while the Greeley area remained flat.

Meanwhile, the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood Metro had a projected drop in housing values of 11 percent, but the declines varied drastically between neighborhoods. In Green Valley Ranch, the company projected a decline of 32.7 percent, but in the trendier Sunnyside neighborhood, house values went up 15.6 percent.

“Frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I agreed with it,” said Kelly Moye with the Colorado Association of Realtors. “This kind of appreciation and this frenzied market is not sustainable.”

Moye said that real estate typically goes in cycles of 10 to 12 years, so since the last downturn happened around 2008, a 2019 downturn would make sense. However, she said their research disagrees with the idea of a sharp drop in housing prices.

“I actually think that more realistic is that we will rise and rise for a few more years, and then we will probably hit a nice plateau where we won’t see huge rises, but we won’t see huge falls,” Moye said.