I ranked Denver's best zip codes for investing -- locals, I'd love your thoughts

[Austin Wolff]

I’m a Data Scientist living in Los Angeles, and must invest out-of-state. Denver is an attractive metro for a few reasons, so I downloaded monthly price and rent growth at the zip code level from Zillow’s public housing data.

I then used a ranking algorithm to sort the top 10 zip codes for investing based on monthly average price growth and monthly average rent growth (both by percent growth), from 2019-2024.

If you know the Denver area well, I’d love your opinion on the results -- I certainly need it. Data science is no good without review by a subject matter expert, such as a local like yourself!

Below is the result of mapping all zip codes, and coloring them by the average monthly price growth (%). You may see some zip codes missing -- this is because Zillow didn’t have data on them in their public dataset I used.

If you’d like to enlarge the image, you can open it in a new tab.

Now let’s only look at only the top 10 ranked zip codes. They are ranked (using the price-and-rent-growth weighting algorithm) as follows:

1. 80003
2. 80401
3. 80219
4. 80017
5. 80010
6. 80212
7. 80239
8. 80104
9. 80249
10. 80226

Let’s see the average monthly price growth map again with just the top 10 zip codes:

Now let’s look at the average monthly rent growth for the top 10 ranked zip codes.

And now let’s look at the rent-price ratios for the top 10 zip codes:

Now let’s take a look at the prices for each of these zip codes:

So far, 80003 and 80219 look like the best zip codes for buy-and-hold strategies close to the front range (if we ignore Aurora, CO completely).

What are your thoughts? Do you disagree? Do these maps fit your understanding of the neighborhoods? I would love to hear your feedback!

[Scott Trench]

Thanks for the informative post! 

A couple of points for your consideration: 

- Are the markets with the most rent growth and price growth the exact opposite, in some cases, of the best markets to invest in now? They were good, but will they be going forward? 

- Are the markets likely to experience the most rent and price growth going forward likely to be: 

    - Markets with the lowest supply coming online

    - Markets with the best schools

    - Markets with the lowest crime

Anyways - food for thought! Also, be careful if you proceed with future analyses like this. Many people have gotten themselves into a tremendous trouble for publicly posting about "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. Whether intent is there or not, you will be accused of redlining if you spin "red yellow green" or similar color coded market maps to identify places to invest or move.