February 2026 Fort Collins Real Estate Market Update

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Man, I think it's interesting watching how the media says one thing and the reality is something completely different, like how Austin, Texas is a market that is struggling. And a lot of the data suggests that that is the case, but I'm on a coaching call weekly with a group of guys and gals across the United States. One of the individuals is from the Austin area and suggests that they've gotten 60 plus leads this year coming in and relocating to Austin. So it kind of like just grounds you really more than anything. This is our Fort Collins real estate, Northern Colorado real estate market update for February 2026, first month in January, kind of hitting the low level.

I always suggest that Super Bowl, the Super Bowl weekend is really when we start to see the bounce. Really when we see the market hit the bottom of activity and people say, all right, let's put our properties on the market. Let's get ready. Let's get going. Buyers are active. They want to get rolling and rocking, which right now I'm working on a deal with a buyer. And if you've ever done a relocation deal, it is quite frustrating to say the least. Patience is crucial on that. I'm going to be sharing my screen here shortly. So if you're watching on Instagram, I'll be talking about data here throughout the time, but the visual will be on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

So if you want to see that or watch the rerun, this is on my Fort Collins lifestyle channel, not my living in Fort Collins channel, but my Fort Collins lifestyle channel. So I'm going to share my screen. We're going to talk about Fort Collins, Northern Colorado, Loveland, Greeley. We're going to go deep dive data today, but also anecdotally, what are teams seeing, activity-wise, and we made a big change in January. We switched from being a boutique brokerage to being a boutique team powered by EXP, which is a national, international brokerage that is exciting for all of us. And we think we're going to do a lot of great things for our clients and for my agents.

I think they're going to be able to produce and do a lot of great business. So jumping right in, we are sharing our screen. This is our median sales price of Fort Collins for January 592, 495, down 2.1% versus January of last year. But on a rolling 12-month average, we're pretty flat. We're at plus 0.8%, so pretty flat really for the last three years. It's nothing too crazy going on. Interest rates were unique in January. They kind of were really plummeting. They were going as far ... We saw 5.5% from some mortgage brokers. Retail lenders were at 5.875 low sixes, so it was kind of one of those things where buyer activity was definitely jumping off the sidelines.

One of the things that the Fed chairman ... There was a new Fed chairman that was nominated, still got to get through and confirmed. But all that stuff is really just ... It's so much noise. It has a lot of impacts on bond, the bond markets, how people are going to be investing, where they want to place safe capital, long-term investments. All I'm watching is the 30-year fix, and I'm seeing how there's supposed to be a correlation between the 10-year and the 30-year. But a year ago, you'd be at 4.25% on the 10, and you were at dang near 7% for interest rates. But we're at 4.25% for the 10 and 6.25% for the 30 years.

It's kind of all over the place, but the reality is, is affordability is the number one driving factor for everybody's decision right now, and prices are at least holding steady in Fort Collins. One of the things that we're definitely watching is inventory, new listings onto the market. We are down 3.3% versus last January, so that's to be expected. We dip in December, January time period. You can kind of see these valleys over the last five years. December is when the fewest amount of new listings hit the market. It makes complete sense. Nobody wants to be shopping during the holiday season, Christmas, Hanukkah, all of that.

It's just a very low activity. You are only putting your property on the market if you have to sell. And then January hits, and we start to see a little bit of tick-up on new listings all the way into June and July. That's when our peak new listings time period hits, with inventory peaking in September and then jumping down. We're a very cyclical market. A lot of people live here, obviously, but a lot of families, and it follows very closely to the school cycle. We're going to see the peak amount of new listings right around tax day, which if you are a business owner, you've got to have your taxes in for a lot of companies unless they're going to do an extension by this Friday.

They ask for it, and then personal taxes by mid-March. Got those in today. Thank goodness. Get that done and over with. But tax day is generally one of the most active new listing week weekends in the entire year. If you reverse engineer it, it makes complete sense because, hey, you know what? We're going to put our house on the market in the middle of April, sit on the market for two weeks, hopefully get that bad boy under contract, and then close by the end of May when my kiddo is out of school or for the family or individuals that are moving into that house, getting them into the house at the beginning of summer so they can make friends before the new school year starts.

So it makes complete sense. That is when the most amount of listings will hit is right around that tax day. We're watching homes for sale and months of inventory. That's where, if you're looking for, waiting for, price compression, price sensitivity, that would be if inventory started to completely tick up. But it's not doing that. New listings are still relatively anemic. Inventory, there's a good amount of demand. Let's look at our closed sales. We had 10.3% higher, 96 closed sales in Fort Collins versus a year ago. Now I'm going to pull up, let's see if I can Google search it real quick, real time.

For those of you on interest, Optimal Blue, there we go. For those of you on Instagram watching me, I'm sorry, you got nose hairs all up in your face. All right, yeah, so going back to January of last year, we were at 6.85%, Monday, February 3rd for our retail lenders versus yesterday's rates were at 6.09% for our retail lenders. It is a direct correlation. As soon as interest rates drop, even the slightest demand picks up, so closed sales were up 10%. Let's look at under contracts, only up 2.6%, but our demand, the only thing that will happen for prices to really have some pressure downwards is if our demand dropped and our supply increased, that is going to be the inverse that you're looking for if you're sitting on the sidelines.

There are a lot of people sitting on the sidelines. We're talking in the realm of tens of millions of people sitting on the sidelines waiting for interest rates to go down to sell their house, interest rates to go down to get off the sidelines, off renting and buying a house. We were working with a new buyer, first time home buyer right now, and our entire offer strategy was around concessions to help buy down the interest rate to make the mortgage affordable. We've kind of talked about this. This is like a 10 to 15 year house for these guys, so ultimately, we talk about how you've got three to four variables on a mortgage.

Your PITI, principal and interest are going to be staying flat for the next 30 years if you're in a 30 year fixed mortgage. Taxes and insurance can absolutely increase. In fact, one of my investment properties, we just got the new bill for it, went from $2,000 a year to $2,400 a year, so a 20% increase on my insurance. Can I pass that on to the tenants? Maybe. Will I? I don't know. They're great tenants, so we wanted to keep them there, so we want to make sure it's affordable. But the reality is for a owner who's going to be buying a house, two of those variables are going to stay flat for the next 30 years.

The principal and interest, which hopefully your income increases. You really just have to make it through those first two, three years of your mortgage payment. I told my sister one time, there's never been a mortgage that I bought that I wasn't comfortable with at the beginning. It's always taken about one to two years while your income has increased a little bit and your mortgage is staying relatively flat to where you kind of look back and are like, dang, I wish I would have bought a few more of these. But demand is up. Days on market, again, this is an interesting one right now, 82 days on market for homes in Fort Collins.

This is a pretty big one, up 43.9% versus a year ago. This is talking to you that if you're on the market, you're going to be sitting on the market for about 50 days before going under contract. Generally speaking, you're going to have a price reduction every 30 to 60 days, one every 30 days or so. My general rule of thumb is 10 showings without an offer or 30 days on the market without any showing. If you're not going to have any, that's essentially kind of the sandbox I play within, but 82 days on the market for a Fort Collins detached house. The longest, let's see here, looking at our max numbers.

This is the longest of records since 2016, 79 days, and we're at 82 days. I would say there's not a canary in the coal mine by any means, but days on market will ... Ultimately, the longer a house sits on the market, more inventory is going to come on. Inventory will pop up a little bit, but again, we're talking winter months right now, so this is to be expected, but a little bit higher than normal. If you're looking at negotiating, this is a percent of original list price. Right now, we're at 97.2% of original list price, so if your original list price is $500,000, you have a 5% reduction, you're at $475,000.

That's essentially where you're going to be is between $475,000 to $485,000 from that original $500,000 list price, so some of the negotiation is happening. Understand too, I think it's really important to understand when negotiating, should you be negotiating the price, concessions, what is the impact to you, and what does that mean to you? If you're talking $5,000, and you are more concerned about your monthly mortgage payment, you should be putting that towards concessions, saving those dollars out of pocket no matter what, because a $5,000 in a 30 year fix is we're talking like $3 a month difference in the payment, so definitely still people are buying down interest rates even with them being down in the 5.75% to 6% range.

Let's look at comparatively to surrounding areas. Really I want to look at Greeley, Colorado Springs, and Denver. All right, so looking at the sales price, let's look at a 12 month rolling average. All of them are relatively similar in the fact that we had a spike up in 2020, 2021, beginning of 2022, and flatlining at the end of 2022 for the last three and a half years. What's crazy to think about is how long we've been at 6% mortgage rates. I bought an investment property in March of 2022, closed at a 4.75% interest rate, was upset about it, like, dang, that is crazy. I can't believe I just bought an investment property at 4.75.

I'm barely breaking even, and I had to put 32% down on that investment property. And it was two months later, we were in June, July time period, and interest rates were at 6%. That was in 2022, so come this June, depending on where we're at, most likely going to be in high fives, low sixes, we will have been at 6% mortgage rates for four years. It has been normalized, people's life events are taking place, they are moving, but it's not at a kind of windfall of new listings and a complete termination of demand. So there's two things I want to talk about today on the general Northern Colorado market, and I'm going to show you a demographic study that was done, I think paid for by the city of Fort Collins, which, by the way, if you're not watching, watch on Tuesdays at noon, I do a live in Fort Collins, talk about things that are happening in Fort Collins, things that you can do, and a city council recap.

Lots of really important things. I wish I could watch all city council meetings for Loveland, Greeley, Windsor, Timnith, but that would be my entire life, and three hours watching people talk at a table is enough for anybody on any given week. That being said, it's dramatic, there's a phenomenal amount of great information at those city council meetings, tons of data that's talking about what they're doing, how they're making plays, how they should do their policy moving forward, but we're going to look at the Greeley MSA versus the Fort Collins MSA here shortly, and it really made me think about what should I do, what should I do with my investing, should I do a 1031 exchange of a property out of Fort Collins and into Greeley with the future potential of the Greeley area.

I mean, maybe, I'm not necessarily saying no to that right now, but let's look at new listings. Again, a rolling 12-month average for, oops, we got to do residential, I want to make it all the same, there we go. So residential for all of them, Fort Collins 625, Greeley, $445,000. Recently I did a video about Fort Collins versus Greeley, and it used to be about, I would say, a 15 to 20% discount from Fort Collins to Greeley. You're more like 25 to 30% from Fort Collins to Greeley right now, so depending on the house type, where you're going to be, we did a new development tour last week. It released on Saturday.

It is on the northwest side of Greeley. Go feel free, watch that video, but essentially for a new build, three to four bed, two bath house, 2200 square feet, $450,000 in your 25 minutes from southeast Fort Collins. So super interesting there. But price is relatively flat across the area for all a 12-month rolling average. Greeley up a little bit. Colorado Springs down 1.6%, Denver down 1.6%. New listings, Fort Collins up 9.7%. This is on a 12-month rolling average, so definitely more activity than took place in 2024. 2025, interest rates were a little bit more favorable. That being said, we saw a little bit more activity across the board, Greeley and Colorado Springs.

New listings up on a 12-month rolling average across the board. This is on a monthly basis, Fort Collins, 330 homes. That is a buyer that's telling you that you're on average going to have 15% more homes than you would January of last year on a monthly basis. Now of course, a lot of the people that are preparing their house for sale, not the cream of the crop new listings, they haven't hit the market just yet, but they will hit the market very soon. Denver new listings though up 23.2%. That's a market that we could see having some price pressures on a downward side. They're having a 23.2% more inventory than last year.

Let's go directly then to closed sales in Denver versus Fort Collins. Denver also has a 4% reduction in closed sales on a rolling 12-month average. Their inventory is up 24%. Their closed sales are down 4%. That's a little bit of an inverse that is definitely worth watching on a basis for Denver. Denver is one of those markets that's consistently in those overpriced, over-hyped markets, and some of that data backs that right there. Days on market. This is rolling 12 months across the board, relatively consistent. Colorado Springs and Denver calculate days on market until the day it goes under contract.

This is suggesting that it's going to be 28 days for Colorado Springs until it goes under contract and 21 days for Denver, but up 40%. Homes are sitting a little bit longer, inventory starting to stack up a little bit, demands a little bit down in Denver. Colorado Springs, Greeley though, and Fort Collins all seem to be doing relatively fine in all those aspects. All right, now here's the demographic data that I wanted to show you guys. Oops, start at 10. Here's the net migration numbers. We do a lot of relocation clients, a lot of investments, buy, sell, invest, whatever that might be, but Fort Collins is ultimately still a community that's expected to grow to just the Fort Collins area, growth management area in Fort Collins to 255,000 people or so.

It used to be super easy to discuss these numbers, 250 by 2050, meaning we were going to grow to 250,000 people by 2050 at our rate of growth from years past, which was about a percent to a percent and a half. Well, we're closer to 0.4 to 0.5% and listening to the city council, they were saying, hey, listen, we are still expecting to hit that 250 to 255,000 people mark. It might just be by 2060 or 2070. So super interesting to watch that because our net migration numbers are down and expected to kind of still be positive, but at a downward trend. So fewer people moving into Fort Collins, the MSA of Fort Collins, and that's essentially like Larimer County area, they talk about the MSA, Greeley MSA, so that's Larimer versus Weld County more than anything, but definitely important data to watch because, you know, hey, the good thing about that is we don't have as much pressure on infrastructure in Fort Collins to grow at the rate that we were.

So we'll grow at a slower rate, but Greeley, blown up. Average net migration 2009 to 2019, 4,700 versus an expected 5,825, a 24% increase. And by 2050, the Greeley MSA is expected to have 100,000 more people than Fort Collins MSA. I mean, Cascadia, the special vote goes on, I think, February 24th, if you're listening to this in Greeley. I'm really interested to know how you're going to vote on that. We actually got reached out by, I won't say who, but we got reached out by a group that wanted to be on our podcast and essentially have a political play. So I kind of, I did not push it through because I didn't want to, I'm for it.

I'm all for Cascadia just to be out there. I think, you know, selfishly it doesn't impact Fort Collins in the sense, well, it could in the sense of our sales tax dollars going to Greeley I-25 and 34, but the city of Fort Collins is not mortgaging our buildings and putting financial and giving our credit of Fort Collins to a development. But also this is a billion dollar, I think hundreds of thousands of square feet, if not millions of square feet, residential, commercial, and entertainment district. This is going to be an absolute game changer. I'm going to vote on 2A. It's 1A, homie. It's 1A, right?

Vote no on 1A. Strictly because if Greeley grows, like you just said, we need to expand that infrastructure regardless and fast. So you want to vote no on 1A if you are a Greeley resident. That a boy, Caleb. Moving down though, here's what Fort Collins' net migration has been over the years. So you know, early 2000s, 2010s, we just saw a dramatic amount of migration into Fort Collins, Northern Colorado, and it was 8,100 people net migration here in 2015. We dropped all the way to 2,500 in 2020, 2021, 2024 saw a drop to 1,800, but we're back up to 3,900 net migration into Fort Collins. Still it's a net migration inflow.

We're not seeing people move out of the community. Still very strong. One of the things that city council talked about this last work session was economic policy. How can we provide incentives for essentially tier one businesses to move here, bring high paying jobs and employers? USDA is coming here, Avago has invested more than a billion dollars into their buildings and have actually brought more employees than was originally expected. But Fort Collins hasn't offered this type of incentive since 2015. They want to offer incentives for tier one employers as well as retailers. They want to keep the share of revenue.

Let's see if I can share this real quick. Oh, I'm going to share two things first and then I want to share the retail revenue in Fort Collins. But here's our projected growth between births and migration. So we're still expected to see 7,400 people births plus migration, but we do have an aging population here in Fort Collins. And across the United States, there is definitely the silver tsunami that's going to be happening for real estate transfer of wealth moving forward, but expected more deaths. And hey, you got a family, let's get that thing growing. We need more babies. We need more babies.

Greeley is actually having a higher birth rate now in 2025 than it did in 2015, which is like definitely against the norm. So Greeley's got a lot of different things that it's going for, that's for sure. And then finally, the last thing I wanted to show was this. This is expected population in the MSAs between now and 2050. So Fort Collins, this is Lamer County, so just Lamer County, Weld County. Fort Collins and Greeley, Lamer County, Weld County. Fort Collins is expected to be at 372 this year and 480,000 people by 2050. And then Greeley is at 367, but expected to grow all the way to 588,000 people.

So more than 100,000 people than Lamer County and Greeley. So definitely something interesting here. Let's see if I can quickly find this because I just want to show it more than anything. It was on the next work session, which was just last week. And it was the share of, come on, that's the transit, that's not what I want to show you guys. Stick with me. Wait, hold, hold. There we go. It wasn't too bad. All right, so this is our next net taxable sales in Lamer County over the years. So Lamer County has always held about, or Fort Collins, excuse me, has always had about 50% of the county's population.

So this orange line. But in the early 2000s, we had closer to 70 to 75% of the net taxable sales. But then you get the growth of Johnstown, Timnath, Windsor, Loveland, Sentara, and all of that starts to pull shoppers away from Fort Collins. And when you have a city like Fort Collins that's based off of the net taxable revenue, they want to keep as much of that as they can. So they are starting to make some economic policy in Fort Collins in Northern Colorado that helps build retail centers, bring in anchor tenants and tier one employers. So there is a focus within Fort Collins for that. Now that is what I've got this week for our monthly market update.

I am going to stick around for a few minutes to answer any specific questions, whether you're on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, all of the above. Feel free to ask any questions, any clarifying questions, and I'd be happy to show it to you. But let's see here, I'll get into some personal anecdotes. As far as for buyer activity, definitely we were able to have some pretty strong negotiations for a house that had been on the market for over 200 days. So not too long ago I did a scatter chart that showed percentage off of original list price versus days till offer. So definitely always take that into consideration.

For a seller, we had a listing that went under contract after two weeks on the market. We had to have a serious conversation with them about pricing and just said, hey listen, here's three homes that sold, very similar comps. This is how long they sat on the market. Here's how long you were on the market because it was listed with another agent and ultimately we had a great conversation, priced it right, sat on the market for two weekends, client came through an open house, made an offer on it, we're under contract. Additionally, cash buyers using bridge loans to secure properties saying, hey, I've got to sell my house.

I want to wait to sell that in a little bit more timely of a market, aka April. So I'm going to get a bridge loan to buy the house currently that I'm looking for. So lots of different strategies that we're implementing. Good activity, activity really picked up in January. We had 17 inbound leads for the month of January. So over one every other, basically one every other day, but just a little bit higher than that. People are still making the move. They're making the move in and out. We actually have a brother, I have a brother-in-law that is seriously considering making a move down to Texas. Affordability is the driving factor and I'm trying to tell him all of the stories from people who are moving here from Texas because they're like, oh man, we're going to be outside.

We're going to be playing, having fun. I'm like, eh, maybe for three months out of the year, the rest of the time you're going to be inside, you know, sweating your whatever off. There's migration everywhere. People's life circumstances are different. The majority of people that are moving here are kind of across the spectrum, but lifestyle design, healthy maintenance, schools, which I did show this earlier, but I'm going to show it as well here. Schools and whether you have kids or not, it's a big important factor for home values and home sales because, you know, ultimately single family, which I guess are just called detached houses, suit well for people with generational living, kids, in-laws, whatever that might be, but schools are always an important thing to consider.

And the Poudre School District just scored very well on their four-year graduation rates. So I'll share my screen again. Oh, you guys are getting to see everything that I do. All the inner workings, guys, but then also Thompson Valley scored quite well, as did Weld County RE4, essentially the three major districts in Northern Colorado. Now Fort Collins does very well for having as many schools in their program as they do, you know, right there, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, both alternative schools, charter schools, and public schools, and still score 89% on a four-year graduation rate.

You look at that. You look at Thompson School District that's got Berthoudt, Loveland, Mountain View, Thompson Valley, above 90%. But you take away Harold Ferguson, I mean, their school system is kicking butt. So great job, Thompson School District. And then Windsor-Severance School District that's got Severance and Windsor High School, 95.7%. That's just very impressive. So whatever school systems you're in in Northern Colorado, you can bet that they are doing quite well on graduation rates on a four-year graduation scale. So those are definitely things that are important to people relocating here.

And if you're buying, selling, you know, you always, that's a big consideration for people. So I don't see any questions anywhere. We're at 30 minutes. I appreciate you guys watching. If you guys do have specific questions, feel free to direct message me, send me an email. Today alone, we had a relocation and then two sell-bys that reached out to us. So activity is popping and I would love to be an asset on your team if that's something that you guys are interested in doing. Appreciate you guys. Enjoy the rest of your evening.