2024 Denver Real Estate Market Predictions

Bold Predictions Commentary for 2024

“This is not the way it will always be” -Unknown

This Post is filled with predictions/guesses for what you can expect in Real Estate next year. As click-bait fills your inboxes, social media and televisions we want to give you some real data and ideas collected from smarter people than us for what we think is coming in 2024. Let’s get to it!

Existing Sales/Transactions

It is wildly thought that next year’s transactions will mimic 2023. We saw the number of transactions fall to levels we have not seen since 1998-1999. Transactions dropped over 22% from 2022 to 2023. In the stock market that would be considered a Bear Market, and you would see stock prices move lower, however home prices have remained mostly the same year over year (supply and demand see below). To say that Real Estate has been all over the place in 2023 is not an exaggeration. While some smarties are predicting home sales to remain the same, some are calling for a 12-18% increase if mortgage rates get below 6%.


Mortgage Rates

Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist for NAR, is calling for 4 rate drops next year bringing mortgage rates to 6.5%  for a conventional 30 year loan. He believes while our GDP is holding strong for now, that when analysis comes out for Q4-2023 and Q1-2024 we will see a weakened economy. This coupled with a continued reduction in inflation will be the main drivers for the Fed to begin reducing its benchmark rate in 2024. There are others that say by mid year mortgage rates will fall below 6% possibly to 5.75%. If this happens you can expect the housing market to take off again. This theory has been tested time and time again this year by Home Builders. When they buy down the mortgage rate for homebuyers  below 6% their inventory disappears. With confidence we think this can be applied to the existing home sales market as well.

Pent Up Buyer Demand

I know we have been talking about Supply and Demand all year, quite frankly for a couple of years now. The graphs we are sharing today will draw a very clear picture of what we are talking about. Millennials, new construction, foreign buyers and those that “love the rate” are the key contributors to our supply and demand issue. The average age a child leaves home in the Millennial Generation is 26 years old. Their household formation average went from 32 years old to 35 years over the last year or so. In 2024 there will be 45 million people 35 years old, the largest amount of people at home buying age ever in our history. What is notable and should not be ignored is the generation coming right behind them. They are every bit as big as the baby boomers in size and will also have an effect on our housing markets for years to come. When we came out of the Covid Era we were 5 million homes short for the amount of buyers that were active in our market. We continue to be short as building homes has become difficult business mainly because of labor (costs and bodies) and supplies continue to be inconsistent. Another weight on our supply issue is the amount of people buying Real Estate from Canada (along with other foreigners) in the US. Canadians buying Real Estate in the US was up 31% in 2022 and another 20% in 2023. Finally, we have commented on repeat month over month about folks with super low mortgage rates sitting on their real estate afraid of moving up or down, in or out. If the predictions are correct and we get below that 6% number you can bet those people will take their appreciation and run into better homes, vacation homes or smaller homes. It is inevitable.

Commentary

We always say that predictions are silly and at our core we believe that. What we have gathered here for you today is something better than blind predictions, it is educated guesses taken from data shared by many industry professionals. These are all national numbers that don’t always apply directly to the Denver Housing Market, but often do because of our quality of lifestyle and age of population (at least over the last 7-10 years). We think that Denver may keep with the National trend in 2024 and 2025- stay tuned. There are more predictions, guesses and information in the full article in our Blog.

Thank you again for supporting our business and our family. As we are rounding year 10 in business with our partner companies we are beyond grateful for awesome clients and awesome employees. Willie and I are excited to see what 2024 brings in for us and for you!

~We wish you and your families, Peace and Health for the Holidays and all the year through~

We wanted to thank Buffini and Company, and The National Association of Realtors for sharing their data and information with us.