2025 Q1 Denver/Boulder Housing Market Update

written by Kristen Naylor

Hello my data nerds! Markets are all weird in general right now. Just a quick glance at any news source and you will see volatility- and interest rates have been mirroring the uncertainty in the market with huge swings in interest rates. Rates may vary wildly from day to day and week to week. I won’t go into the mechanics of why the economy is doing what it is, but what I can do is provide some data around the housing market in Denver/Boulder and propose where I see opportunity for buyers, sellers and investors.

First, let’s talk about new listings. You can see that since our lowest in new listings at the end of 2023, that we saw more sellers interested in selling their homes in 2024. That trend continues in Q1 of 2025, which is actually interesting to me because despite sellers who might have homes with very low interest rates, we are still seeing sellers motivated to sell their homes.

Next, we have Closed Listings. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important metrics to check out when considering the health of a housing market. While we have a huge amount of new listings, we have an extremely small amount of homes actually being sold. This is a snapshot of 5 years, and looking back further, it is actually the lowest amount of sales we have seen in the entire MLS since summer 2016 (which interestingly coincided with inventory). You can almost pinpoint from this graph exactly when interest rates started to rise (end of 2022).

But, we can see more homes closing at the end of last year and into this year, although closings seemed to have leveled out from January to March. These metrics together paint us a picture of Months of Supply:

Basically, months of supply uses the amount of inventory and the amount of closed sales to determine the rate of inventory absorption. In easy terms, how many months will it take the current housing inventory to sell and currently we are looking at 3.25 months of home sales on the market. With all this data you may be thinking- well obviously prices MUST be reflecting the buyer-friendly market. Let’s look!

Here is the kicker: homes are still selling close to their list prices! But, when our hot market used to demand offers well over list price, we are seeing on average there are many less bidding wars on homes.

So you may be wondering- what does it all mean for buyers and sellers in the market?

For Buyers- rates are still high, but if you are watching closely for a good opportunity, they might dip and you could lock in a decent rate if you time it right. How do you time it right? Be ready and watching! With less competition in the market (many buyers are sitting on the sidelines waiting for rates to come down), you can get into a home with more favorable terms. This is the best time to be a buyer in the Colorado market that I have seen in my 10 years in real estate.

For Sellers- there is way more competition in the market than we have seen in recent history. So being strategic with staging, pricing, the condition of your home, and marketing is VITAL for success. Sellers can truly only control three things: price, condition (of your home) and marketing. So working with the right Realtor team can make or break your home sale in this market.