Welcome to March where inventory should start ramping up into summer. So far that’s true with 1,425 single family homes active in El Paso County. That’s up from 1,364 a month ago. If this year is anything like normal we should see inventory climb into summer and peak sometime around kids going back to school.
February 2025 saw 745 sales here locally for a median sold price of just under 475k. Median days on market for the houses that do sell are about a month and a half. The 745 sold units represents the lowest sales volume here locally since 2015. That’s why all the Realtors want to be your friends on Facebook.
I’m going to sum up the whole market real quick right now for those of you that don’t want to read all of this. The houses that are nice and priced aggressively are selling pretty quickly. Like in a week or two. The houses that aren’t as nice, and aren’t priced aggressively, are sitting longer and maybe not selling at all. While from like 2012 to 2022 it was easy to set comps higher with each sale we are slowly but surely setting lower comps across neighborhoods while overpriced listings sit back and curse us. That’s the market in a nutshell.
I keep wanting to cite local foreclosure stats but for whatever reason the trustee hasn’t updated their stats since November. Not sure what to make of that as they’ve generally been great with satisfying my nerdly needs. I’ll probably file a complaint here soon.
Nationally mortgage delinquency rates remain boring. Very subdued at something like 1.77% of all mortgages seriously behind, compared to about 11% during 2009-2011. I think this is all thanks to the still elevated price of houses and the fact that even those homeowners who are seriously behind on their mortgages still have equity. So rather than falling behind tremendously people rush to market and still sell. Time will tell if prices can dip low enough to get enough people under water for it to significantly impact the market. I think so, but then again, we will see.
One interesting fact is that M2 money supply seems to be heading up again. And for those of you who read these rants M2 money has a .88 correlation coefficient to the price of houses here in our area. So one could argue that a spike in M2 is pretty likely to lead to climbing home prices. 
We’re like 200 billion dollars below record highs set during the madness and the bottom of the recent dip represents roughly the time that banks started going bust in 2023. However if we zoom out we can see that M2 money has basically only ever gone up.
And that real estate pricing has really generally just gone up too. That is over the long haul. 
The only meaningful difference between the two charts above is what can be described as the market being irrational longer than people can remain solvent. People lost their asses on real estate in the late 80s, the early 2000s, 2009, and surely some people are losing their asses or about to lose their asses now. But generally speaking, if you’re solvent, real estate goes up in price together with the artificial creation of funny money brought to us by the central bank.
So to keep this post obnoxiously short. If you’re looking for a place to live for a year, or two, or even three please do yourself a favor and rent. If you’re in the military and you’re stationed here for 18-24 months and have no intention of coming back, please, rent. If you’re struggling to make ends meet as a renter, please continue to rent as home ownership has bags of dicks in store for you you’ve never even thought about. (Ask me about replacing 140 feet of water line 3 days before Xmas last year)
Now if you want to be a landlord despite the crazy ass laws here in Colorado, maybe buy. If you know for a fact you’re going to stay here in the area for the next 10 or more years, you should buy. If you like tinkering on shit and making it your own, and you’re cozy making 360 payments, buy. For the long haul always buy and take advantage of the many benefits of ownership.
But for the short term, for crying out loud, please rent.