HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
STATE SPOTLIGHT
“loser dive mall” was converted into one of these developments where his son now lives. “My son … now he has his own little downtown area about 10 miles from downtown.”
neighborhood who are just renting out a room, and they are getting 1,000 bucks a month for that. … (It) makes housing more affordable.” Ochsner, the employing broker at RE/MAX Alliance, said the building of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) is popular in Portland, another market where his brokerage does business, and he expects that trend to accelerate in Denver also as homeowners gain more equity but have fewer options when it comes to moving up to a new home. More than 9,000 Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs) were originated in the Denver metro area in Q2 2016, up 24 percent from a year ago to the highest level since Q2 2006 — when more than 10,000 HELOCs were originated in the metro area, according to the ATTOM Data Solutions Q2 2016 Loan Origination
Report . The increase in Denver was the eighth highest among 73 major metro areas analyzed in the report. Bridge Loans for Move-Up Buyers Meanwhile, some prospective move-up buyers concerned about not being able to quickly secure their future home in the highly competitive Denver market are resorting to bridge loans, according to Ochsner. These short-term loans allow homeowners to leverage their current property to make a competitive offer on their next home — either an all-cash offer or an offer with a beefy down payment. Once the new home is secured, the old home can be put on the market and sold to pay off the loan, according to Jodi Thomas, a president at FirstBank in Wheat Ridge.
Renovating for Short-Term Rentals Meanwhile individual homeowners are
taking it upon themselves to do some small-scale infill development to help address the supply scarcity and deteriorating affordability in Denver. “We’ve seen people in the neighborhood — they’re basically putting a mother-in- law suite over the garage and turning it into either long-term rentals or short rentals,” said Holt, who lives in the Washington Park neighborhood adjacent to downtown Denver. “People can now turn their homes into income- producing assets. There are people in my
DENVER METRO HELOC ORIGINATIONS
10,633
9,353
ATTOM Data Solutions • P16
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