Local, State and National Pricing Trends
Most of the stats on this site provide a focused picture on market dynamics for homes of various sizes in the specific communities we cover in Boulder, Broomfield and Jefferson Counties. In the graph we've included in this section, we provide long term data on real estate price changes comparing the real estate markets in Boulder County, the Denver Metro Area (including Denver, Douglas, Adams, Broomfield and Arapahoe Counties), the State of Colorado, and the United States. Specifically, the data represented in this graph illustrates the appreciation rate for these four areas, the rate at which prices have increased or decreased on a quarterly basis since 1980.
A cautionary note on reading this graph: Where you see a line on the graph moving up from 4% to 6%, this means that the rate of price increases is accelerating. Where it is moving down from 6% to 4%, this means that the rate of price increases is slowing down, not that prices are dropping. In this case, prices are still increasing at a rate of 4% a year. It is only when the lines on this graph drop below the 0% baseline that you're seeing actually drops in housing prices. You'll see that prices dropped for about 2 quarters in Boulder County in connection with the demise of the oil industry in Colorado in the late 1980s and that they dropped over a period of 2 years in the Denver Metro area and in Colorado as a whole over that same time period. You'll also note that the line dropped slightly below the 0% baseline for the Denver Metro area in the 3rd quarter of 2007.
Click here to see the chart on Local, State and National Pricing Trends.
Source of Data
This chart is based on data compiled by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), a Federal office within HUD that has oversight responsibilities for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two of the nation's largest sources of mortgage financing.
These data are probably the best available for tracking home price trends on a large scale. Rather than simply tracking average resale prices in a given area, the OFHEO tracks multiple sales of specific houses. For example, if their data show that the home at 567 YourHome Lane in Louisville, Colorado sold for $125,000 in the second quarter of 1992, and then resold for $325,000 in the third quarter of 2007, they know that this home increased in value by $200,000 over that time frame. If their compiled data on other homes sales in Boulder County indicate that this home should have increased from $125,000 to $$320,000 through the second quarter of 2007, they can conclude that the price increase for this home in the 3rd quarter of 2007 was $5,000. Compiling this data point with similar data on the repeated sales of thousands (or millions) of other homes, they can then calculate the annual appreciation in a given market by in a given quarter.
The mathematics underlying the OFHEO data is actually much more complicated that what we've indicated here. If you want additional information, visit their site at www.OFHEO.gov and read the technical data on their House Price Index.
