Denver homebuyers are getting richer and driving up home prices

Denver homebuyers make more money than they did pre-pandemic.

• Yes, but: It's still not enough to cover the rise in home prices over the last two years.

By the numbers: Denver posted the 36th-largest increase in homebuyer incomes in the nation between 2019 and 2021, according to a Redfin analysis of mortgage data in the country's largest metros.

• The median homebuyer income in Denver was up 8% from 2019. But the median home price in the Mile High City grew by nearly a third during that time, Redfin reported. That's versus 29% nationally.

What's happening: Since the start of the COVID pandemic, Denver has become a magnet for white-collar workers — suddenly free to work from home — to relocate from pricey job centers, like California, and leverage their higher salaries to buy cheaper homes.

• The influx of out-of-towners puts Denver in the top 10 cities nationally where the purchasing power of outsiders outpaces that of existing residents — a factor that's significantly driving up home prices and critically limiting housing supply.

The big picture: All those remote workers made previously inexpensive areas across the country much less affordable, Axios Markets' Emily Peck reports.

• In these "pandemic boomtowns," homebuyer incomes soared over the past two years — and home prices went up right along with them, per Redfin's analysis.

What's next: These bubbles aren't busting, per se, but they're slowing down as more costly mortgage rates, coupled with higher prices, crush demand.