Fort Collins bucks trend in housing

With stronger home prices, the city is surviving the market better than most. By Christian Toto
Special to The Denver Post Article Last Updated: 05/10/2008 12:12:21 AM MDT
<script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"></script> Fort Collins consistently shows up on lists of the best places to live in the United States. (Brian Brainerd, The Denver Post ) <script type="text/javascript"></script>

Broker associate Marcus Valdez has a hard time drinking tap water when he travels across the country.

The water in Fort Collins, where Valdez works and lives, has spoiled him to lesser streams, he said.

To him, it's a small but telling reason why Fort Collins appeals to home shoppers. Combined with its scenic vistas and proximity to Colorado State University, it has also helped the city consistently show up on lists of the "best places to live."

"There's an environment here that's safe, nice and clean," said Valdez, who works with Keller Williams Realty in Fort Collins.

And homebuyers are eager to check it out. While the housing market continues to stumble, homes in Fort Collins are bucking national market trends. In 2007, 3,363 homes in Fort Collins sold, up 16 percent from the 2,910 that sold the year before, according to Keller Williams.

The median sales price was also up 2 percent. "We had less supply then most markets," Valdez said.

Business is up

A flood of new and existing businesses is keeping local real estate agents busy.

Fort Collins already is home to CSU, Hewlett-Packard and Intel. Danish wind energy company Vestas recently opened a plant in nearby Windsor and is aggressively expanding in the area.

Data from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight shows that home prices in Fort Collins gained 1.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared with the same quarter in 2006. Prices in the Denver metro area dropped 0.49 percent during the same period.

"Fort Collins has weathered the (housing) storm better than a lot of areas in Colorado," said Dave Pettigrew, a broker with Prudential Rocky Mountain Realtors in Fort Collins.

Home prices in Fort Collins might not be as reasonable as in some smaller cities, but they hold up well compared with Boulder. A home that might sell for $210,000 in Fort Collins would fetch roughly $400,000 in Boulder, said Chuck McNeal, chairman of The Group, a family of real estate companies in northern Colorado.

Appealing location

Cincinnati resident Dick Easley, 63, just bought a home in Fort Collins and will be moving west at the end of the month.

"I love the view of the foothills and the mountains. I bought a house that looks out that way," Easley said.

Easley previously called San Francisco and Los Angeles home, but now he craves the beautiful vistas and slower pace that Fort Collins affords.

"We like the fact that we're near the mountains but it's not mountain rustic," Easley said, adding he doesn't want to live too far from a major city.

His daughter moved to Boulder recently, and he spent the past year visiting Colorado and considering it as a place to which he might move.

Old Town Fort Collins keeps its old- time atmosphere. The city, with a population of about 131,000, is about 60 miles north of Denver. (Brian Brainerd, The Denver Post)

"I didn't even know where Fort Collins was when we started thinking about where we wanted to live," Easley said.

Local residents helped win him over.

"They seemed happy and friendly. If you travel around the East, you don't get a lot of that," he said.

Few regions get as much glowing press as Fort Collins does. Money magazine ranked the city as the No. 1 place to call home in 2006. In 2003, AARP dubbed it the best place to re invent your life.

"The news gets around," Pettigrew said.