U.S. home prices fell at a record pace late last year, but Denver fared much better than other metro areas, according to two home price indices released Tuesday.
Metro Denver home prices fell 4 percent in December compared with the same month a year ago, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.
Denver's decline was the smallest of the 20 major metro areas tracked in the index, which fell a record 18.5 percent between December 2007 and December 2008.
"We have been dying from a thousand cuts since 2001 when our foreclosures started going up and the rest of the country was booming," said Mike Rinner, an executive vice president with the Genesis Group, a local real estate marketing firm.
Years of modest price appreciation now look like a blessing in disguise that has shielded the metro area from the 30 percent-plus annual declines measured in Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Francisco, Rinner said.
Because Denver's housing market turned south early, the inflated mortgages made in other markets when home prices peaked in 2005 and 2006 are not as much of a problem here, said Michael Kone, an economist with Housingmetrics in Boulder.
But he cautioned that a softening economy could continue to put downward pressure on prices. "December over December did look better, but I noticed that things locally started to slip again in January," he said.
A more conservative and broader index from the Federal Housing Finance Agency registered a 4.5 percent annual decline nationally in the fourth quarter, the largest recorded drop since the index started in 1975.
Denver-Aurora-Broomfield ranked 111 out of 292 cities with a 0.71 percent annual decline in its home price index in the fourth quarter.
No. 1 in the rankings was Decatur, Ala., with a 6.6 percent gain, and No. 292 was Merced, Calif., with a 49.5 percent annual drop in home prices.
Boulder ranked 17th, Grand Junction 77th, Fort Collins 91st, Pueblo 99th, Colorado Springs 146th, and Greeley 224th on the FHFA index.
Price appreciation in the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield market over the past five years was 6.34 percent.
Above-average population growth and stability in jobs also appear to have supported metro Denver's housing market last year.
Detroit, like Denver, didn't see a run-up in home prices earlier this decade, and it still suffered a 21.7 percent annual decline in December, from a year earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller indices.
Colorado's population is growing at nearly double the national rate, and job losses in December were one-third the national rate, according to a report from George Antoine, Denver regional economist with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A report from the Colorado Division of Housing Monday showed that the number of foreclosure filings declined 14 percent in the fourth quarter, while foreclosure sales fell 20 percent.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com
