John Rebchook is a former Rocky Mountain News reporter with more than 30 years of experience in writing and communications... Earlier today, I posted a blog that DataQuick of San Diego reports that June home sales in the Denver area hit at an 11-year low and 10.5 percent below June 2008.
Independent broker Gary Bauer doesn’t necessarily disagree with those statistics, but he isn’t troubled by them, either.
Because this has been such an extraordinary year as far as the economy and the real estate market – not just in Denver but across the nation – that 2009 is basically the dawn of a new real estate era.
“The philosophy I have taken, while I still do comparison to the prior years, is that basically, I am counting 2009 as the beginning of time, as far as real estate,” Bauer told me.
I suppose whether this is year Zero or One in the real estate calender is something for mathematicians and philosophers to discuss.
Bauer, who on Friday will release his own report on the state of Denver’s real estate for the month of July, said that 2009 needs to be the baseline year that all future data is compared to, because we’ve never seen anything else like it.
“This has been such a dramatic and unusual recessionary period,” Bauer said. “We have lived through other recessions and lived through some quasi-booms. But this one is so unique, so unusual, that is far as I am concerned, 2009 is the first year of real estate.”
Or, to borrow a phrase from the Book of Genesis in the Bible: “Let there be light.” At least the light at the end of the real estate tunnel.
