Northern Colorado Market Update - December 2025
This fall has been an interesting one for housing in Northern Colorado. Buyers are finally feeling like they have some leverage and are intent on using it. You can hardly blame them, the NoCo market has been absolutely merciless for home buyers over the last 6 years.
First it was pandemic bidding wars and then they had to endure soaring interest rates along with prices that were very stubborn to correct. And while high mortgage rates battered housing markets in cities like Austin that lost 25% of their median price, NoCo prices refused to fall, and in some cases continued to climb.
But this fall we’ve noticed a significant change. Although we always feel things slow down late in the year, it has been particularly difficult to get our listings sold during the last half of 2025. It feels like every buyer in NoCo collectively said “Enough is enough. We refuse to buy a home unless we’re getting a great deal.”
They see homes sitting on the market for longer, they see price drops occurring on a wide variety of listings, and many have an experimental mindset as they enter the market. We’ll buy IF we can get a good deal.
Last month I experienced something I cannot remember seeing in all my years of real estate. We had a new listing hit the market, we priced it slightly below what comparable sales suggested in order to move it quickly. Sure enough, within a few days we had two buyers offering at the same time.
Given how we priced the home and the activity we were receiving, I expected the offers to be full price, or maybe slightly above. I was wrong. The offers came in $25k and $30k under list price. I was stunned. “Didn’t you guys get the memo? We’re in a bidding war here.” They didn’t care, both buyers were ok with losing the home and continuing their search.
The sense of urgency to get a home locked in is gone. Now the priority is pricing. Find me a great home at a great price and I’ll buy it, otherwise, I’ll keep looking. Now we were able to get one of the offers up to full price with a counter offer, but the story still illustrates the mindset of buyers in the current environment.
Right now in Larimer and Weld County we have about 1,200 active listings on the market per county. Let’s put that into perspective, when inventory bottomed out in late 2022, active listings were down to about 350 in each county. So we have about 3.5 times the number of homes on the market now, compared to when inventory bottomed out during the low interest rate environment of the pandemic.
Now let’s get even more perspective. How does our inventory look when compared with the financial crisis of 2008? Even with inventory climbing as much as it has, we still have less than half the inventory we did during the mortgage crisis that occurred 17 years ago. I feel this is particularly important to point out with all the garbage headlines I see in the news and in social media. I had someone tell me the other day that inventory levels were currently matching the conditions of 2008, but this is far from true.
The median price for a home in Larimer County is down -5% compared to November of 2024. In Weld County prices are down about -2%. The average home is selling for 97% of list in Larimer and 98% in Weld County and sits on market for 60 days before receiving an offer.
5% is about as big of a price correction as we have seen in the modern era of NoCO real estate. I know every first time home buyer in the country is waiting for the housing collapse that the internet is hellbent on predicting. And if you believe the hype, by all means, continue to wait. But do understand that with the high cost of development in the West, mostly due to the difficulty of finding water rights for housing projects, our corrections tend to be relatively mild because it is so difficult to bring new housing projects to market.
Also, with rates on the drop and the start of the prime season just a month away, further price corrections are likely to face headwinds. Zillow is projecting a 1.2% increase in median prices nationally over the next year, and I expect NoCo prices will do about the same.
We are waiting impatiently for January to come around. The new year always brings more buyers in the market and this is when we tend to see prices start to climb. Prices tend to bottom out in December, then rise from January through June, and then descend back down during the last 6 months of the year.
We’re also seeing a bright spot with mortgage rates. They are staying in the low 6% range with some duration. We’ve stayed in that range for 3 months now which is a welcome change to the wild rate swings over the last 3 years. Our buyers are locking 5-1 arms at 5.5% and fixed rate mortgages in the high 5% range. If rates can stay where they are, we expect to see a “goldilocks” market in 2026, not too hot, and not too cold. Just right!
- Grey Rock Realty
Kelly Renz 970.820.0750 KellyRenzRealEstate@Gmail.com
