Denver Is 1 of 4 Cities To "Close The Book" On Housing Slump

Metro Denver has become the first major city in the Mountain West - and one of only four nationwide - "to fully close the book on the housing crisis" by seeing housing prices exceed pre-recession levels.

That's according to the latest quarterly "Mountain Monitor" regional economic report from Brookings Mountain West. Overall, Denver is "one of the strongest economic performers in the region," although economic growth slipped from the previous quarter, says the report, which focuses on the fourth quarter of 2014.

"At the end of 2014, house prices in Denver reached levels last seen before the Great Recession," It says. "All of its regional city peers except Colorado Springs beat the national average in terms of house price growth over the quarter, reinforcing the region's leadership in the national housing recovery." The previous Mountain Monitor Report, covering the third quarter of 2014, said the economic output of metro Denver grew more than any other city in the nation from the previous quarter, up 1.5 percent.

In Q4, the growth of the Denver area's output - the value of all goods and services produced locally - "fell back to earth after an exceptionally strong third quarter," the new report says.  Output grew by 0.6 percent, just under the national growth rate of 0.7 percent. But metro-area jobs grew by "a strong 0.8 percent to cap out a year of steady expansion," up from 0.7 percent in the previous quarter, and the local unemployment rate is nearing pre-recession levels, the report adds.

As for housing, the Mountain Monitor says that "a rapid 3.3 percent increase in home prices over the quarter positioned Denver to end 2014 with a milestone: It became the first metro area in the region to fully escape the housing crisis as prices matched, for the first time, their pre-recession levels. Denver joins only three other mtero areas from Texas in having achieved this."

Colorado Springs, meanwhile, "lost some momentum at the end of the year," the report said.  "Employment contracted by 0.1 percent over the fourth quarter - the third quarter in a row of effectively nonexistent job growth for the metro area.  After a strong third quarter, the rate of expansion in output slowed by a full percentage point to 0.3 percent. What's more, after rapid declines in the middle of the year, the unemployment rate fell by a comparatively tame 0.6 percentage points."

It also said the springs, is "the only metro area in the region where the housing recovery proceeded more slowly than it did nationally in the fourth quarter." The Mountain Monitor report is produced by Brookings Mountain West, a partnership of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  It's written by Kenan Fikro and Mark Muro of Brookings.

Article is from the Denver Business Journal - Written By Mark Harden