Tuesday, October 30, 2012

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.
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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.”

Friday, October 19, 2012

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)


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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.
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"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.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Coloradoan article on homeownership

Home ownership: An American dream in decline (9/1/12)
While home ownership rates have fluctuated, they are retreating to more reasonable levels before a spike in the early 2000s — levels Weiler called “an aberration.” Ryan McMaken, spokesman for the Division of Housing in the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, agreed home ownership is not going away, just stabilizing. Rates “were at unsustainable numbers for awhile,” he said. Back in the ’60s when the country experienced real wealth growth, home ownership topped out at 65 percent, he said.
In the ’90s, numbers jumped again when “more people were able to get into more homes by adopting more debt,” he said. “It wasn’t part of a larger issue where income was growing so everyone was running around buying houses.” And it’s likely the rate will go up again as rental units shrink and rents rise, McMaken said. “Eventually rents will get so high due to low vacancies people will become very interested in buying,” he said. “That will drive up sales prices then we will see owners of single-family rentals begin to sell them rather than rent them out.”

Denver Post, September 2012

Foreclosures up 4 percent in Colorado metro counties (9/21/12)

"With all of the slowdowns and administrative delays that pushed foreclosure filings down so far last year, I expected a larger increase in filings this year," said Ryan McMaken, a spokesman for the Colorado Division of Housing. "Instead, new foreclosures are only up slightly this year, while completed foreclosures really dropped off, reflecting last year's big drop in new filings."