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Denver is America’s best city to buy a home, 
Forbes magazine says in a new ranking of U.S. metro areas.
“While the majority of the nation’s housing markets are still working toward a bottom, some cities are boasting fundamentals that make them good places to buy a home now,” Forbes reported this week.
Phoenix was ranked No. 2 on the Forbes list, followed by Boston, San Diego and Los Angeles.
The Forbes rankings seem geared more toward each market’s current and future potential as a place to buy a home, since some of the cities at or near the top of the list are among those hardest hit by the recession.
The report ranked the 25 largest U.S. metro areas on the basis of change in price per square foot, frequency of real-estate transactions, and how evenly distributed home-sales activity is in a metro area.
“Denver tops the list,” Forbes said. “It had 25 percent of its property sales occur within approximately 25 percent of the city’s ZIP codes. This means sales in various parts of the city were fairly evenly distributed, showing proportionate activity. The further a city deviates from the 25 percent mark, the less evenly distributed the market is in that city, and thus the lower that city ranks.”
Forbes also determined that average price per square foot of housing space increased 5.7 percent in Denver between February and March of this year, and that transactions decreased 8.4 percent between March 2008 and March 2009, less of a drop than many cities.
“Denver scores very well in terms of being able to bring people into a stable housing market,” the magazine quoted Moody’s economist Christopher Cornell as saying. “It has better growth potential than most cities today.”
Forbes listed Las Vegas, Cleveland, Seattle and Detroit at the bottom of the 25 cities. “There, distressed sales have kept home values down and buyers away,” Forbes said.
It’s the second time in as many months that Denver has held the top spot in a ranking of real-estate potential.
On May 19, Denver was named America’s No. 1 city on the verge of recovery in a segment on NBC’s “Today” show. Real estate expert Barbara Corcoran, a regular guest on the show, said Denver more than any other U.S. city is “clearly on a rebound.”
Forbes drew its data from March 2009 RPX Monthly Housing Market Report, distributed by Radar Logic Incorporated, a New York-based derivatives firm.
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