Denver's Suburbs Draw More New Coloradans Than The City Itself
The Denver area still draws a lot of interest from out-of-town movers despite widespread housing affordability challenges, but most of that interest is concentrated in the surrounding suburbs rather than to the Mile High City itself, according to a new report from MoveBudda.com, an online relocation information service, using census data.
When the study asked people who are moving to Colorado where they are going within the state, very few said they were moving to Denver itself. Instead, these movers said they preferred living in suburbs like Broomfield and Golden where there is less crime and homelessness, a trend that mirrors what MoveBudda recorded in other cities like San Francisco, Seattle and New York City, MoveBudda Communications Manager Nick Pipitone told Bisnow.
“Population trends are always important indicators for commercial real estate,” Pipitone said. “Wherever there is hiring flow, there is usually a strong economy and a lot of talented professionals who live there.”
Prior to the pandemic, census data shows that metro Denver’s population grew by nearly 20% between 2010 and 2020, with the apex of that growth occurring in 2015 when more than 68,000 people moved to the area.
However, that growth has tapered off in recent years as the economy continues to recover from the pandemic and the area’s high cost of living eats away at homebuying demand. Metro Denver’s population decreased by about 0.87% between 2020 and 2021, according to census data, before moving slightly upward in 2022.
The suburbs in general became a more attractive proposition for office workers with the advent of remote work, which allows people to cut down on their commuting time or eliminate it altogether.
Remote workers made up the largest percentage of people who were looking to move to Denver during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, CBRE found. But that interest began to wane in June 2022 as inflation and high interest rates rapidly increased the cost of living or buying a home in Denver.
“A lot of this interest in Denver’s suburbs has to do with economics. It’s just simply more affordable to live outside of the city than it is to live in Denver,” Pipitone said.
And although Denver's housing prices seem expensive to longtime Coloradans or people moving from lower-cost states, they look like a great deal to people moving from some of the country's priciest markets, like New York City.
For example, the report recorded a move-in-move-out ratio of 6.50 between Denver and Brooklyn in 2023, which means that there were approximately 650 people looking to move to Denver for every 100 Denverites that considered departing for Brooklyn, the largest different recorded in the report.
The continued interest in moving to Denver bodes well for the city’s future employment base, Pipitone said, despite the fact that the Mile High City is struggling to attract as many workers as suburbs like Westminster and Aurora, which have more relatively affordable housing options.
“The trend of people moving to the suburbs could be big for multifamily developers,” Pipitone said. “Owners and operators might be able to fetch higher rents out there while downtowns across the U.S. recover from the pandemic.”
