despite a brutal housing market, one realtor sees buyers and sellers trying to do right by each other
By Kyle Harris | Published on February 4, 2022
If you thought grocery store shelves were barren in January, check out the housing market.
“There were only 1,477 active properties on the market in the entire Denver metro area at the start of 2022,” wrote Andrew Abrams, the chair of the Denver Metro Area Realtors Market Trends Committee, in the organization’s February Market Trends Report. “That represents 11,175 fewer houses on the market than normal.”
There were 48.88% fewer homes on the market in January 2022 than in January 2021, according to the report. Prices, on the other hand, were up 18.68%.
Real estate continues to be a booming industry in the metro area — especially in the past couple of years. In 2020 and 2021, Denver’s real estate market grew by $208 billion, the report stated. It grew by $212.1 billion the decade prior.
But as the Federal Reserve is likely hiking interest rates in the weeks and months to come to combat inflation, many investors and homebuyers alike are scrambling for low-interest mortgages and jumping into the already competitive market, driving up prices and lowering available housing.
In the wake of the Marshall Fire, DMAR is anticipating the housing market to get even tighter.
Bidding wars are raging, and realtors are leaning on all sorts of tricks to ensure their clients find homes in a market with such limited housing stock. Some buyers are waving inspection and repair requests to sellers to make offers more enticing.
Mala Vyas, an agent with Greyrock Realty who’s been working on the Front Range and metro area for the past six years, told us she’s heard of buyers losing out in bidding wars to people paying $100,000 over the asking price.
She’s seeing properties being shown 30 to 80 times.
“If I can, I get intel from the other agent, so I’m not wasting his or her time, or my time, or my client’s time or the seller’s time,” she said. “We may not consider putting in an offer if it’s already out of what my clients are comfortable with or what their budget is.
“What I’m seeing is there is a lot of demand and not a lot of supply,” she added.