DENVER (KDVR) — The Denver area’s housing expense is among the nation’s most expensive.
The Colorado Association of Realtors announced today that the median price of a single-family home in Colorado passed $500,000 for the first time ever.
According to Property Shark, an investment advisor, Denver proper is now one of the country’s most expensive cities in terms of housing purchase costs.
The study claims $250,000 in Denver gets an average 673 square feet, matching the price per square foot of some East Coast areas. The same amount of money gets roughly the same square footage in Staten Island or Queens, New York.
It is significantly less square footage compared to the price of other major metros. The same price gets over 1,000 square feet in Miami and Chicago, over 1,100 square feet in Austin and Atlanta, over 1,200 in Sacramento or Colorado Springs, over 1,300 in Fresno and over 1,400 in Nashville.
This comparative lack of space for the money isn’t a Denver problem, either.
Cities proper often have higher prices than their suburbs. This is true of Denver and its suburbs, but the entire statistical area is also higher priced than other metro areas.
The Denver-Aurora-Lakewood statistical area sells one square foot of space for $234.29 on average, according to Inspection Support Network. This puts it in the top 15 most expensive statistical areas in the country.
In terms of price per square foot, the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area matches that of: Providence-Warwick, RI; Riverside-San Bernardino, CA; and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV.
The only statistical areas exceeding Denver’s in price per square foot are:
- Providence, Washington, D.C.; Portland; Miami; Sacramento; Seattle; Boston; San Diego; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and San Jose.
Notably, many of these areas have lost some of the young population Colorado gained.
According to the Brookings Institute, Colorado ranked third among U.S. states for the number of 25-39-year-olds it brought in between 2015 and 2019.
Millennials in their home-purchasing years only flocked to Texas and Washington in greater numbers, while draining away from New York, California and Illinois most heavily.