Half of Metro Denver's Listings Have Cut Their Price

The national forecast says prices will hold. Half of Metro Denver's sellers have already cut.

National forecasters revised their 2026 outlook over the past few weeks. Mortgage rates are now expected to hold in the mid-6s instead of the low 6s, and projected existing-home sales were trimmed from 4.5 million to 4.2 million. The one number they left alone was the price forecast. They still expect home prices to rise nationally this year, on the reasoning that there aren't enough homes for sale to push prices down.

That reasoning doesn't fit Metro Denver. Right now, just under half of all active listing in the metro are sitting with a reduced asking price. Across the seven core counties, 6,472 of 13,161 homes for sale, about 49 percent, have cut their price at least once.

Against June 2023, the share of listings carrying a price cut is up roughly 10 to 15 points across most of the metro. We're back at the level last reached at the peak of fall 2024, and reductions usually keep building through the summer, so it's likely to rise further from here.

Why both can be true

The two facts fit together once you sort out which homes are which. The ones that sell were priced correctly from the start. The overpriced ones don't sell. They sit on the market and cut their price until they land in that 49 percent. So closed-sale figures look healthy while the for-sale side looks soft. When you hear that prices are holding nationally, that's the closed-sale view, and it only counts the homes that found a buyer.

What's behind it

The driver is affordability. The 30-year rate ticked up to about 6.6 percent last week and has been bouncing with news out of the Middle East, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Loan applications jumped almost 11 percent in a single week, but most of that was existing owners refinancing rather than new buyers; purchase applications rose a more modest 7 percent. Among the buyers who are active, a growing share are reaching for adjustable-rate loans, now 8.6 percent of applications, to bring the monthly payment closer to 6 percent. That's a sign of stretch, not strength.

The back end of that stretch is starting to show. Front Range foreclosure filings are up about 12 percent over the past year, and Colorado's foreclosure-help hotline has taken roughly 47 percent more calls than it did a year ago. We're fielding more short-sale calls ourselves than we were twelve months ago. This is not 2008. The totals are still a small fraction of what they were then, and most homeowners today have real equity to lean on. But the same affordability pressure that shows up as price cuts on the front end is starting to show up as distress on the back end, and it's worth watching.

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Sources: REcolorado MLS; DMAR Market Trends; Mortgage Bankers Association; The Colorado Sun. Historical price-reduction shares from prior Principal Team market reports.