May 2013 clippings

Some other recent stuff :

Apartment vacancies rise in Fort Collins-Loveland
Northern Colorado Business Report-May 9, 2013
And for the first time in the past year, the area surpassed Denver metro in average rent prices, according to Ryan McMaken, an economist with ...

Denver rents at all-time high
kdvr.com-Apr 29, 2013
Ryan McMaken is an economist for the Colorado Division of ... McMaken says the metro area has seen an average rent increase of 4.2 percent ...

Colorado Springs apartments in high demand
Colorado Springs Gazette-May 2, 2013
Because of the demand, expect rents to continue to rise or hover near their record high, McMakensaid. A decline in rents will happen only if the ...

Report: Springs apartment market strong
Colorado Springs Business Journal-May 6, 2013
But it's not so low that renters are crunched, said Ryan McMaken, an economist with the division of housing. “Healthy” should not be confused ...

Report: Springs apartment market healthy
Colorado Springs Business Journal-May 1, 2013
A vacancy rate of 5.6 percent allows apartment complex owners to raise rents and keep up with expenses, McMaken said. But it's not enough to ...

Clippings, May 17, 2013

Some recent clippings:

Weld, state foreclosures continue to fall
My Windsor Now - ‎10 hours ago‎
McMaken reported in his release that all of the state's 12 metropolitan counties reported declines in sales and auctions. Only 10 of the state's 64 counties reported increases, but they were small counties with fewer than 40 filings in each county. Foreclosure ...


Foreclosures drop dramatically in Larimer County and statewide
ReporterHerald.com - ‎17 hours ago‎
The first-quarter numbers of filings - 4,571 - and sales - 2,935 - were the lowest since the state started keeping track in 2007, according to a release from Division of Housing economist Ryan McMaken. "The trend downward is accelerating, helped along by low ...


Colorado Springs' foreclosure picture brightens - Colorado Springs Gazette
Colorado Springs Gazette - ‎22 hours ago‎
Credit a turnaround in the housing market for the improving foreclosure situation, said Ryan McMaken, a Housing Division economist. Low mortgage rates are driving a demand for homebuying, which is pushing up prices. That increase in values means it's ...


Colorado foreclosure filings plummet 41 percent in the first quarter
Denver Post - ‎11 hours ago‎
"The trend downward is accelerating, helped along by low mortgage rates, rising home prices and a stabilizing situation," said Ryan McMaken, economist for the Colorado Division of Housing. All of the state's 12 metropolitan counties reported year-over-year ...


Steep drop in Colorado foreclosures, filings in Q1
Denver Business Journal - ‎May 16, 2013‎
Ryan McMaken, economist for the housing division, said the downward trend "is accelerating, helped along by low mortgage rates, rising home prices, and a stabilizing employment situation." The first quarter of 2013 was the fourth consecutive quarter to see ...


Foreclosures plummet in Larimer and Weld
Northern Colorado Business Report - ‎19 hours ago‎
New data from the Colorado Division of Housing shows dramatic drops in both foreclosure filings and foreclosure sales for first-quarter 2013. In Larimer County, foreclosure filings fell by 40.5 percent from 306 to 182 from first-quarter 2012 to the same period in ...


Colorado Sees 41 Percent Drop In Foreclosure Filings
KUNC - ‎May 16, 2013‎
The decline in foreclosures has been a statewide phenomenon so far this year, said Ryan McMaken with the Colorado Division of Housing in a statement. Foreclosure auction sales, or completed foreclosures, experienced a drop of nearly 30.5 percent this ...

New Book Review

My book review on Brian Doherty's book on the Ron Paul movement was recently published in the scholarly journal The Independent Review.

A TV clipping, April 29, 2013

From a Fox31 evening broadcast on April 29:

From the story:

Ryan McMaken is an economist for the Colorado Division of Housing, and says the latest spike in rent comes down to supply and demand. “Demand just continues to be significant here, and they’re really not building that much in the big scheme of things.”

McMaken says the metro area has seen an average rent increase of 4.2 percent from this time last year, while the vacancy rate is at 4.6 percent, a .3 percent drop off.

Even with the construction of new apartments in downtown Denver, McMaken says it won’t be enough to really offset demand, and rent prices. 

“Yes, the number of new units has increased over 100 percent, easily, in the last couple of years.” But McMaken says, “If we look at the total numbers there, it’s just not really that much compared to how many units we have, and how many households are being formed.”

McMaken on home ownership rates.

Randal O'Toole kindly quoted me in his book American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership.  On page 2: 

“Homeownership has let us down,” said Time magazine. “The dark side of homeownership is now all too apparent: foreclosures and walkaways, neighbothoods plagued by abandoned properties and plummeting home values, a nation in which families have $6 trillion less in housing wealth than they did just threee years ago.” When the Census Bureau reported American homeownership rates had fallen from 69 percent in 2004 to 65 percent in 2010, housing economist Ryan McMaken responded that “the present rate needs to drop even more.” 

To put it in context, here's the article he's quoting.

Local CBS interview this week

The latest from the local CBS affiliate (CBS4):

Snip: 

“We know that vacancy in single family rentals is very, very low, two percent or so. Vacancy in apartments is about 4.3 percent. Those are very low levels,” said McMaken.

That is one factor putting pressure on housing demand. Another is cost.
“Colorado is consistently in the top three of the places college grads say they want to move. People are moving here. They’re staying here. Because where else are they going to go?” said McMaken.

Fox31 Clip: Multifamily Construction

From last weekend:

DENVER — This year in Denver, more than three thousand building permits have been issued to developers putting up apartment buildings, which in turn means there are thousands of construction jobs which need to be filled by skilled workers.

“Construction jobs didn’t bounce back after the initial drop off following the financial crisis, we had just seen a long steady decline that happened from 2007 really until very recently when we started to see construction jobs tick back up,” said state housing expert, Ryan McMaken. “But if job growth were really good, we’d probably be seeing far more demand that we’re seeing now.”

Latest Scholarly Publication

I'm a contributor to the upcoming Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought, coming soon from SAGE Publications.

I'll be providing the entry on Conservatism.

At $350.00 per multi-volume set, you'll be needing a copy for your night stand.

More clippings from today and yesterday

Boulder County, state foreclosure filings on pace for lowest year since 2006(Daily Camera)

"Completed foreclosures continue to head down at a steady pace," said Ryan McMaken, economist for the Colorado Division of Housing. "As home sales and home prices, rise, it's getting a little easier to avoid that final foreclosure sale through a short sale or even a conventional sale." Weissmann noted that Boulder County saw just six such sales last week while many other Colorado counties are recording double digit auction sales each week.

County foreclosure sales see big drop(Ft. Collins Coloradoan)

“Larimer County continues to see improvement in employment, foreclosures, home sales, vacancies and rents (from an owners’ perspective),” said Ryan McMaken, economist for the Colorado Division of Housing. “Looking at all of that and the fact that Fort Collins/Loveland has low unemployment, it’s not terribly surprising that the foreclosure situation continues to improve.”

Fewer homes auctioned off(Pueblo Chieftain)

Ryan McMaken says foreclosure sales fell nearly 24 percent in the first three quarters of 2012, compared with the same period last year. There were about 12,000 foreclosure auction sales through September, down from 15,000 in the first nine months of 2011, the agency said. 

Latest foreclosure data release, Nov. 8

I released the state's foreclosure data today.

9News picked it up:

Also, The Den Post:

Foreclosure sales in Colorado down 23.6 percent so far this year  

Foreclosure auction sales through September were 11,898 compared to 15,565 in the first nine months of 2011."Completed foreclosures continue to head down at a steady pace," said Ryan McMaken, economist for the Colorado Division of Housing. "As home sales and home prices, rise, it's getting a little easier to avoid that final foreclosure sale through a short sale or even a conventional sale."

October 30, 2012 clippings

Denver Post: Denver metro apartment vacancies fall; rents rise

Ryan McMaken, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Housing, said that a big factor for the low vacancy rate is that apartment construction hasn't kept up with demand. Earlier in the decade people were leaving apartments because they thought they could afford a home. As a result, demand for apartments decreased and little apartment construction happened.

Now, said McMaken, apartments are being built, but still not nearly enough to keep up with household formations among young people along with migration into the city.

Through Sept. 10 of this year, 1,644 apartment units have been added to the market. That compares to 1,146 in all of 2011 and just 498 in 2010.
...
McMaken said that the lowest vacancy rates recorded in the past 30 years were 3.6 percent in both the third quarter of 1982 and the third quarter of 1994 .

 Boulder County Business Report: Apartment vacancy rate low, rents high

"The average rent has grown year over year in every quarter for the past two and a half years, and it has recently begun to accelerate." Colorado Division of Housing spokesman Ryan McMaken said in the release. "The rent growth we're now seeing is starting to look like what we experienced in the days of the dot-com boom."

Denver Business Journal: Denver apartment vacancy rate hits 12-year low

“The average rent has grown year over year in every quarter for the past two and a half years, and it has recently begun to accelerate,” Ryan McMaken, Division of Housing spokesman, said in a statement. “The rent growth we’re now seeing is starting to look like what we experienced in the days of the dot-com boom.”

Fort Collins-Loveland metro area has highest apartment rents in state

Fort Collins-Loveland metro area has highest apartment rents in state (Denver Post, 10/19/2012)

...
Ryan McMaken, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Housing, said that apartment rents in the Fort Collins-Loveland area rose to an average of $996 in the second quarter of this year, the most recent period for which data is available.
That's higher than the $979 for the Denver metro area, which traditionally has the state's highest rents.
McMaken noted that the figures are for metro areas only. "Fort Collins-Loveland is probably not higher than Aspen," he said.
...
"It looks like the two are converging again, so they could reverse themselves," McMaken said. "They have similar rents now because they're the two markets with the most growth and the lowest vacancies."
McMaken said the vacancy rate in Fort Collins-Loveland was 3.5 percent in the second quarter, close to the 3 percent figure that is considered "very low." Denver's vacancy rate in the second quarter was 4.8 percent.
"There's been a ton of new construction in Loveland, and that area has a lower unemployment rate than Denver — substantially lower, in fact," McMaken said.