What is the Boulder Real estate market like ? (Denver, Longmont: houses, neighborhood)

[Katarina Witt]

From the Boulder Daily Camera:

Average/Median Prices in various Boulder/Broomfield County towns and cities, December 2007:

Boulder: $641K/580K, 40 houses

Broomfield: $263K/223K, 26 houses

Erie: $410K/306K (Note: partly in Weld Co.), 18 houses

Lafayette: $362K/310K, 12 houses

Longmont: $268K/218K, 67 houses

Louisville: $397K/340K, 10 houses

Superior: $400K/339K, 12 houses

Mountains: $438K/385K, 19 houses

Plains: $879K/510K, 20 houses

[missingcol]

what is the meaning of the number of houses? new listings?

[Katarina Witt]

The number of houses sold in the month of December. Obviously, from the point of statistics, the more houses, the more reliable the numbers.

MOD: Typo fixed in original post.

[suzco]

Originally Posted by pittnurse70

From the Boulder Daily Camera:

Average/Median Prices in various Boulder/Broomfield County towns and cities, December 2007:

Boulder: $641K/580K, 40 houses

Broomfield: $263K/223K, 26 houses

Erie: $410K/306K (Note: partly in Weld Co.), 18 houses

Lafayette: $362K/310K, 12 houses

Longmont: $268K/218K, 67 houses

Louisville: $397K/340K, 10 houses

Superior: $400K/339K, 12 houses

Mountains: $438K/385K, 19 houses

Plains: $879K/510K, 20 houses

To add to this,
here's the information for the year from 12/01/06 through 11/30/07: (From Boulder Area Realtor Association online)

Average/Median Prices

Boulder: $622,391/551,375; 934 houses sold

Broomfield: $383,849/310,000; 399 houses sold

Erie: $350,156/300,000; 307 houses sold

Lafayette: $399,701/315,500; 323 houses sold

Longmont: $280,723/240,000; 1120 houses sold

Louisville: $390,078/355,000; 252 houses sold

Superior: $412,929/382,500; 172 houses sold

Mountains: $447,613/350,000; 315 houses sold

Plains: $672,691/509,750; 429 houses sold

[livecontent]

In looking at this data--you can see that the Average (Mean) is always larger than the Median. This would tell me that there are some very higher price homes in each area measured, that skew the data set.

Of course there can always be a high priced home because the upper limit can be consider somewhat infinite, in real estate costs, while the lower limit cannot because zero would be the limit. Of course there would be no zero priced homes but even more so, home in this area would be virtually non-existent at lower than 25 thousand--and there can much more extremes at the higher limit of the measure of real estate costs.

So that in Boulder and The Plains, it indicates, for example, that both these areas have had some extremely high priced homes that have sold. The mean itself is of little value without the knowledge of the standard deviation which would give us indications of the dispersion of the data.

The median is more indicative of the actually prices in a community according to this data set. So if you rate the cost of housing in a community base on the median in this data set, you would get from high to low:

Boulder
Plains
Superior
Louisville
Mountains
Lafayette
Erie
Broomfield
Longmont

This would be something of the data that I would expect, just with a cursory real estate knowledge of these areas, if I was speaking anecdotally.

What do you think??? Did I wrap myself up in my own tail.

Livecontent

[Katarina Witt]

I think you got it right. It was about what I expected, too. For the most part, the year-to-date prices are similar to the December prices, even for the communties where few houses were sold in Dec.

Thanks for fixing my typo, Mike!

[tenzi]

What's the Boulder real estate market like ? Has it come down like other areas or is it doing alright ?

[chilaili]

It certainly hasn't come down but I get the impression it's taking a lot longer to sell properties

[NickMan7]

Boulder and surrounding areas were not hit terribly hard by the real estate mess that's plaguing much of the country. While values aren't necessarily sky-rocketing, there has been appreciation in some areas while others remain mostly unchanged. Much of the Denver/Boulder areas have actually not seen depreciation like other parts of the country, so any turn-around to appreciation won't take as long as other areas.

[seethelight]

Originally Posted by tenzi

What's the Boulder real estate market like ? Has it come down like other areas or is it doing alright ?

I live in Boulder (Gunbarrel) and the market is not going down at all. Due to the fact that when a house is underpriced, at least in my part of town, the houses are either torn down or remodeled and the new asking price is significantly higher than the previous price, thus raising the prices for the whole neighborhood.

Two blocks from where I live two 7,000 ft. houses were torn down and new 9,500 sq. ft. houses are being built, and one was bought for $850,000 and is now on the market for $1.9 million, of course with a significant remodel.

So if you are trying to buy something at a bargain, it's hard to do in Boiulder, and when the housing market ever gets going Boulder will become even more expensive.