High land bucks real estate slowdown: prices are holding steady, and construction continues in the hip Denver neighborhood.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: WHO OWNS COLORADO

Somewhere in America, there's a price-reduced house for sale. Somewhere in this great land of ours there's a mortgage crisis, a credit crisis, a looming recession. Somewhere there's a real estate agent soberly assessing his or her frail, flailing, failing career.

Somewhere, maybe. But not in Denver's Highland neighborhood.

How hot is Highland? Let's put it this way: The Denver neighborhood that sits just west of Interstate 25 off of North Speer Boulevard now has its own cute nickname, LoHi.

We asked a bunch of real estate agents and developers how the boom there has been affected by the national real estate slowdown.

"Negligibly. There is an enormous amount of interest, prices are not coming down and construction continues," says Jim Rodriguez, Realtor with Re/Max City Horizon in Denver, a Highland homeowner and one of the most active agents in the area. Plus, "a huge number of permits have already been issued, and a lot of stuff is on the drawing board. The slowdown is having no effect. I have plenty of clients still looking to buy."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Highlands is becoming increasingly competitive, and prices are going through the roof," says John Chavez, principal of Dorado Developments, the company Rodriguez credits with kicking off the ongoing building boom there.

"This area is really hot. Sales have slowed down, don't get me wrong. It's not the glory days anymore--in 2005 everything sold up there. Yet developers aren't shying away from putting projects on the board, that's for sure."

All this heat draws comparisons to Cherry Creek in days past

"Appreciation there has been very strong," says Liz Richards, broker associate with Kentwood City Properties. "That has been driven by the new-build market. It's going to surpass values of Cherry Creek and downtown at some point once it's all built out."

Paul Tamburello is similary bullish. The broker associate with Distinctive Properties Ltd. in Denver is one of the more active real estate agents in the neighborhood.

"What is interesting is that north Cherry Creek is damn near built out," he says. 'There are not that many lots left. So what does a developer do when there's no more dirt? You have to find another place. So we have had a lot of Cherry Creek developers recently looking there. What seems expensive to people who've been in Highlands for 15 years seems really cheap to somebody in Cherry Creek. Now, they can't get the prices that Cherry Creek is getting, but still they can...