which denver ZIP codes have done better in this cooling housing market?
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By Bernadette Berdychowski | Published on January 25, 2025
Real estate broker Cooper Thayer accumulated a lot more furniture this year due to the state of the housing market.
His family-run brokerage, The Thayer Group, has a warehouse where they store furniture items for home stagings to attract the attention of buyers. And, lately, they’ve been staging a lot more of them in the increasingly competitive market for sellers.
Home stagings — placing decor to showcase how homes on the market could be lived in — used to be reserved for luxury mansions to impress wealthy clients. But now, Thayer said it’s used for any type of home, including entry-level.
“We always do professional photos and make the home look as good as we can,” Thayer said. “But this year, we've really started to take the extra step to differentiate those listings.”
The Denver metro area saw a surge in the number of homes on the market over the last year. Prices are dropping in some ZIP codes and many homes for sale are staying on the market longer, marking how the environment has become much more competitive for sellers.
It’s a stark contrast to 2021 and 2022, the peak of the housing market boom during the pandemic, when people were lining out the door for showings and homes were flying off the shelves, metaphorically speaking.
“We're so accustomed to the craziness of the past couple years that this just feels slow,” Thayer said.
The cooling market is a return to some normalcy as the balance between buyers and sellers has evened out, he explained.
And with it, home values are much more dependent on the market factors affecting those neighborhoods, rather than sweeping rising values across the board like during the white-hot market.
A split market
Typical home values in the Denver metro area rose the most in suburban ZIP codes, according to an analysis of Zillow data by The Denver Gazette. The coolest parts of the region’s housing market were near the urban core of Denver and Boulder.
Zillow’s metric calculates home values based on the average home in a given area, not just the ones sold to adjust for seasonal trends of what types of homes hit the market. The data analyzed covered the period between Dec. 31, 2023 to Dec. 31, 2024.
The largest home value increases were seen in 80103, 80117 and 80118, the ZIP codes covering Byers and in Arapahoe County, Kiowa in Elbert County and Larkspur and Sedial in Douglas County, respectively. The areas saw home values increase more than 3.24% over the last year.
The biggest decreases happened in Downtown Denver’s ZIP Code 80203 and the 80247 neighborhood on the edge of Denver and Aurora, where prices fell more than 4%.
Boulder home values in the urban core experienced a smaller drop to Denver, declining at 1.8%.
The Denver region’s housing market is split into two, said Thayer, who’s also a real estate data expert and Colorado Association of Realtors’ market spokesperson for Denver and Douglas Counties.
“We're seeing a big difference in how single family homes are performing in the market, versus how multi-family homes, like townhomes and condos and other attached homes are performing,” he said.
Areas with a higher concentration of single-family homes saw prices rise in 2024. Areas with more condos and townhomes saw the largest declines, as urban centers typically have more concentrated housing developments.
For example, in Douglas County, Thayer said the area has seen a strong luxury market that’s contributed to price appreciation. But the makeup of the kinds of homes have also made a difference.
Douglas County is predominantly made up of single-family homes. Larkspur’s ZIP code had 90 closed sales in 2024, Thayer said. Only three represented townhomes or condos.
“The amount of appreciation was pretty correlated with how prevalent multi-family housing is,” Thayer said.
Real estate and construction industry advocates have loudly called for state leaders to address the shortage of condos in Colorado, a typically more affordable option for first-time buyers. One way is modifying state law to limit lawsuits on construction defects that, they argue, have driven up insurance costs.
But it’s not just on the development-side that’s driving up insurance costs. Premiums are rising across the board, making the affordable option much less affordable.
“They're getting it from both their personal home insurance and then they're also getting it through their HOA fees,” Thayer said.
Some of it is also taste and preference.
The pandemic trend of people moving further away from the city center for more space and larger homes is still happening, said Amanda Snitker, chair of Denver Metro Association of Realtors Market Trends Committee.
“Even though a lot of people have gone back to the office, it's still more of a hybrid situation for a lot of people,” Snitker said.
Denver homes take longer to sell as buyers wait and watch
The market has slowed down significantly as buyers are much more hesitant than they were a few years ago.
Most homes in December were on the market for at least 40 days, up 42% year-over-year, according to DMAR’s data. But 40 days is much more the speed of a more balanced market, Snitker said.
Out of 91 ZIP codes the association releases data on, 79 areas saw their average days on the market grow.
The largest increase was in the 80235 ZIP code, home to the Marston Slopes, Pinehurst and Pinecrest neighborhoods in Lakewood.
Homes there sat on the market for 26 days in 2023. At the end of 2024, it was nearly twice as long at 51 days.
"The only thing that kind of jumps out to me for this area is that the homes are a little older, so they might need updating," Snitker said, adding buyers who are waiting are much less likely to buy a fixer-up in this current market.
Zillow’s housing market heat index — a calculation of how hot a market is based on user activity on listings, days on market and price reductions — marked Denver in December as “neutral,” though it’s important to note December is one of the slower months for Denver’s housing market.
Denver saw a “strong” seller’s market during the spring selling season in 2024, but it was the coolest spring selling season since the pandemic and shorter-lived than in 2023. And the slower season was the “coolest” of the last five years.
Snitker said buyers have held out hoping for federal interest rates — and in turn mortgage borrowing costs — to come back down.
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates twice in 2024, with the upper limit of the federal funds rate going down from 5.5% to 4.5%.
For 2025, the speed of rate cuts is expected to be slower. Fed officials have signaled they’re going to consider future rate cuts with more scrutiny due to stubborn inflation and uncertainty over how President Donald Trump’s plans for the economy, notably tariffs, will make an impact.
This year’s housing market is starting at a similar place from 2024, Snitker said. But many buyers who have been waiting since 2023 for interest rates to go back down may start to realize their borrowing costs aren’t going to budge much anytime soon.
Once patience runs out, priorities shift.
“It's just taken some time for buyers to understand that this is the market we're in,” Snitker said.
But with homes sitting on the market longer, Snitker said buyers have more opportunities to get better deals.
In November, DMAR reported nearly half the homes under contract had at least one price reduction and 60% of sellers offered a concession from interest rate buydowns or repair credits.
“There's a lot of terms in our contract that aren't just price.” Snitker said. “And so getting buyers more of what they need and what they want to be able to move forward is a position that they're in right now that they haven't been in a long time.”