Places like Phoenix, Florida, Las Vegas, and Atlanta have been constantly focused on because they have bad foreclosure rates, tons of short sales, and so on. The focus needs to begin to shift from those areas to the places that have good things going on. Everybody already knows that there are several unfortunate souls who bought their home in Las Vegas, and won’t actually start paying it off for another 10 or 15 years because it has decreased in value so much.

So let’s turn our attention to the Denver metro area. While it is true that there have been several negative impacts on the Denver area, this area has withstood much of it. There is still a steady increase of new homes in this great area. New homes and construction is probably the best indicator of the economy of an area. Once new homes have stopped being built, it can be assumed that growth has stagnated.

Homes are built because people are moving into them. Construction workers and contractors wouldn’t have jobs if there weren’t people buying their product. That means that there are other people in the area offering employment, so job creation is still high in the area. Within the Denver area, the average city has 5% of their real estate listings for sale, as new home construction. That’s a decent number. For example, Aurora Colorado has almost 2000 homes for sale, and right around 100 of those homes were built in 2011. Those homes have never been built occupied. That means that the people building homes in Aurora know that there are going to be people occupying those homes, because there are jobs for people to have when they move into the homes.

Denver has 3,700 homes for sale, and 160 listings are new. That’s almost exactly 4% of listings, are new construction. One area where Denver has steeply decreased in the new construction is condos. There are just over 20 new condos, or only 2% of new construction is condos for sale.

On the down side, there are places like Boulder. While it is a very popular place to move, perhaps the glow of the area has worn off. There are 209 homes for sale in Boulder, and only 2 of those were being built, or are being built right now. Both of them are over one million dollars - it looks like Boulder won’t get any new faces in new homes any time soon. You can expect Boulder’s growth to stay stagnant.

As poorly as Boulder is doing right now, Broomfield is doing marvelous. Maybe people are moving from Boulder, a little closer to Denver into Broomfield. Right now, over 15% of the homes for sale in Broomfield are new construction. That’s a phenomenal growth rate, and we may expect to see the area double in size. Expect to see good things coming out of Broomfield Colorado in the near future.

More evidence strongly suggests that Broomfield is going to be the best city to live for the next several years. The percentage of foreclosures in Broomfield is only at 2%, compared to other Colorado cities which usually sit at 5%, and sometimes as high as 10%. So if you want to live in a young, hip, up and coming area, then Broomfield CO is for you.

One area that has great new growth, but mixed signals with their foreclosure percentage, is Broomfield’s neighbor to the East. Brighton Colorado has a good percentage of new homes being built, in fact it is second in the state. But it has the highest percentage of foreclosures. This may indicate that the area showed promise, but then quickly failed, or a large employer went out.

If you want to move into a city with a high amount of new homes, the top three, with percentage of new home listings being over 10%, then your choices would be Broomfield (16.62%), Brighton (12.90%), and Parker (10.92%). With homes that are experience moderate growth, but not quite as aggressive as the above mentioned three, Castle Rock (7.65%), Thornton (6.25%), Highlands Ranch (5.93%), Longmont (5.58%), Lone Tree (5.41%), Aurora (5.22%). And then homes that fall into the third tier are Denver (4.26%), Golden (3.93%), Arvada (2.91%), Westminster (2.90%), Littleton 2.34%, Lakewood (2.32%), Englewood (2.26%), Evergreen (1.81%). Areas with stagnant new home construction include Centennial (1.64%), and Boulder (0.96%).

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