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Spotlight on Wheat Ridge Colorado
Michael V Welk
October 13, 2008
Last week the Jefferson County Association of Realtors (JCAR) put on a seminar spotlighting Wheat Ridge Colorado. I was fortunate enough for them to allow me to speak upon the current real estate trends for the city. My broker Lon Welsh at Your Castle Real Estate provides us with enormous amounts of data which allows us to be a trusted source of real estate trends throughout the entire Denver metro area. After breaking down the specific information for Wheat Ridge here is what I discovered.
• The average home price has changed a positive 6% from 2007 vs 2008 compared to neighboring cities of Arvada (-9%) and Lakewood (-4%).
• The absorption rate is relatively balanced, with 4.6 months of inventory, which according to NAR would make this a sellers market.
• The average home price is $274,000.
• At the time of this presentation there were 163 residential properties listed as active with 32 being under contract.
• Home ownership of 54.6% vs Colorado at 67.3%.
What does all this mean? In my opinion I feel that Wheat Ridge is heading in the right direction and it is nice to finally see some of the metro area cities starting to rebound. I feel that Wheat Ridge is being somewhat insulated. With a lower percentage of the higher $500k + homes, which have a current absorption rate of over 30 months (yes months) in the Denver market, they are able to stay on the seller's side of the market. They also have a lower home ownership percentage, which also agrees to a stronger rental market.
Not having a large number of higher priced homes is only one small indicator. A major factor in their success is a strong city government who has the proper vision and also Wheat Ridge 2020, which is a new community-based, non-profit development corporation created to facilitate and partner in neighborhood and commercial projects that implement the Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy (NRS) adopted by Wheat Ridge City Council.
Reviewing the map below you may notice that some of the neighborhoods were combined to accommodate enough data to report on. Please feel free to comment on the map. We have access to this data for the majority of the Denver Metro area.
