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Week of December 29, 2022
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DENVER, COLORADO
A publication of
VOLUME 96 | ISSUE 6
Small drop unlikely to reverse skyrocketing home prices
A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH POLE
Sellers, buyers play waiting game BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Danielle and Stephan Storinsky “saw the writing on the wall.” It foretold how the housing market might change. So, earlier this year, the married couple sold their Arvada townhome. They timed it just right. They capitalized before concerns about inflation took center stage. They sold their home when the metro area was gripped by historically high housing prices. They bought their townhome about five years ago for $285,000. They sold for $521,000. “That part’s pretty nice because now we have a decent amount of money to put down on something,” Stephan Storinsky said. But now, on the other side of cashing in, they find themselves playing a waiting game. Even with the tidy profit they hauled in, they are struggling to find a home at a good value. Houses on the market today “are just not worth the price that people are asking,” said Stephan Storinsky. The couple are living with parents, constantly keeping their eyes open
United Airlines provided a festive flight to the North Pole for Warren Village families on Dec. 17. Families boarded a decorated plane at DIA for the special flight — over Colorado Springs and back — before landing at United Airlines’ maintenance hangar, which was magically transformed into the North Pole. There, the families enjoyed games, treats and visits with Santa Claus COURTESY OF WARREN VILLAGE and other holiday characters
for a good deal. The couple isn’t alone. While the number of available metro area houses shot upward in a year, so has the number of days those homes are sitting on the market until they sell, according to the latest report by the Colorado Association of Realtors. One sign of the cooling real estate market are For Sale signs outside homes, an indication realtors are no longer overwhelmed by prospective clients. The shift comes as mortgage rates — the amount of interest people
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pay on their home loans — ticked steadily upwards in recent months, making housing that’s been rising in price for the better part of a decade even costlier. The only light at the end of the tunnel lately could be a slight drop in interest rates. But a drop in home prices might not be in the cards, one metro-area realtor says. “I think it’ll be a small increase throughout the first half of the year and then potentially a small decrease the last half of the year,” said Andrew Abrams, a real-estate broker
in Denver who has rental properties in Jefferson County. But, overall, home prices are expected to keep going up, Abrams said. As it is, the market is stagnating. Not only are there buyers like the Storinskys playing a waiting game, but many prospective sellers don’t want to leave behind the cheaper mortgage payments they clinched before, likely on mortgage loans with SEE PRICES, P3
FORCED TO FLEE
Asylum-seeker charts a path in the Denver suburbs P10