Trying to buy a starter home in Denver? You’ll need more more money than last year

2 min. read
Denver on an autumn day. (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite) residential real estate; skyline; cityscape; denver; colorado; weather; cowx; autumn; kevinjbeaty; denverite;

Denver on an autumn day. (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)

If homeownership seems an ever-elusive target to you because you live in Denver, this report from Trulia will be validating. 

The amount of income needed for a starter home in Denver has increased 5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the fourth quarter of 2016. That's the tenth highest increase among the 100 largest metropolitan areas that Trulia analyzed.

Quick reminder, a starter home in this case is one that's in the bottom third of home value estimates of all housing, including homes not on the market. It's not just housing in the bottom third of the whole pool of listing prices. With this methodology, Trulia estimates that the median price for a starter home in Denver is $236,000.

A lot of the usual unaffordable metropolitans -- San Francisco and Sacramento, to name two -- outranked Denver for how much more money was needed to get that starter home. But Tacoma, Washington, saw the highest increase, 7.7 percent, in income needed to buy a starter home.

Though Denver's in the bottom of this list, it's a big jump compared to the last time Trulia looked at this very issue. Then, they were comparing the 2012 income needed to buy a starter home to the 2015 income needed to buy a starter home. Denver didn't even crack the top ten.

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