Heavy snows in the second half of March didn’t keep metro Denver’s housing market from heating up right on time, according to a Denver Metro Association of Realtors report.
Both sellers and buyers showed up in larger numbers in March, allowing the inventory of homes available for sale to bounce back from the record lows reached last month.
Metro Denver saw 5,706 new listings hit the market last month, an increase of 33.6 percent from February, but 2 percent less than a year ago.
Buyers were there waiting, putting 4,720 homes under contract, a 13.7 percent jump from February and 8.15 percent less than March 2015. There were 4,053 homes sold in the metro area, up 27.7 percent from February and down 7 percent from a year earlier.
The slight surplus of new listings over homes claimed by buyers allowed the active inventory of homes for sale to rise to 4,482, still super tight but a 13.1 percent improvement from February and 9 percent more than were available in March 2015.
The report gives no indication that too much supply is coming on. The average days on market for a listing in March was 38 days, down from 46 days in February and 39 days in March 2015.
Anthony Rael, chairman of the DMAR’s market trends committee and a local real estate agent, said that the March numbers were positive, especially given how sparse the inventory was at the end of February.
“It’s evident that an abundance of new listings can be very quickly absorbed in our market, and if we could magically double the listings again next month we’d undoubtedly have no problem selling it,” Rael said in comments included with the report that was released Monday.
The median price of a single-family home sold rose 5.3 percent from February to $345,000, while the average price of a home sold rose 5.1 percent to $400,535.
The median price of a condo sold was up 3.3 percent to $208,000, while the average price of a condo sold in March was up 1.4 percent to $257,311.
Sales were especially robust in the middle- and upper-end of the market. Homes listing for $550,000 to $749,999 experienced a 77 percent increase in sales in March versus February.
Sales of homes in the $750,000 to $999,999 price range were up a similar amount, 78 percent, according to the DMAR report.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or @aldosvaldi
