DENVER (KDVR) — The Denver area isn’t the draw for real estate investors it once was a few years ago.
According to real estate broker Redfin, June data shows the Denver metro is among the areas that have seen the sharpest drop in investor interest in the last year.
Formerly, the Denver metro was a red-hot investor market. Nationally, as many as one in five homes in the U.S. were bought by investors, depending on the quarter.
In Colorado, investors have been very active in the housing market. Between the first quarter of 2021 and the fourth quarter of 2022, about 15% of the number of homes sold in the Denver metro were to investors.
Fast forward to 2023 and the picture has changed. In the first quarter of 2023, the Denver metro’s share of homes sold to real estate investors has fallen 50% from a year ago, the 12th highest rate among large metros.
The Denver metro had the ninth-lowest share of homes purchased by investors in the first quarter of 2023. Only 13.4% of homes were sold to investors, down from the 15% set in the year before.
Investors are much more interested in the home markets in booming Florida cities and in relatively cheaper cities in the Midwest. In Miami, one-third of homes are sold to investors, while 22% are sold to investors in Jacksonville. About 24% are sold to investors in Cleveland and 22% in Detroit.