Things that bloom in the spring: tulips, daffodils — and home listings.

Both on Colorado’s Western Slope and across the national housing market, spring is traditionally the busiest season for home listings.

The timing is partially driven by natural consumer demand, though it has also been utilized as a pricing strategy. According to published analysis by national real estate company Zillow, U.S. homes listed in the last two weeks of May tend to sell for almost 2% more than average, or $5,600 on a typical U.S. home.

This global trend is especially true in Denver, where homes listed in the first half of May go for 2.6% more than the average price — a $15,500 average boost to the final sale price.

The same analysis found that homes listed in April sell the fastest — but why do more people look for homes during the spring?

A few reasons: This is when people hunker down and get serious about looking for a new home before a lengthy summer vacation or before the school year starts in the fall. This makes it the optimal time for sellers to list their homes for higher commanded prices, as targeting late spring shoppers means more eyes on homes, and thus more competition.

For Colorado’s ski resort towns, influential factors can also include the end of the ski season and the start of summer tourism. 

Mike Budd, a real estate broker associate with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Colorado Properties, said spring buyers typically start showing interest in home ownership from May to June, which is also when listings start hitting the market.

“Traditionally, maybe you have your property up for the winter, or you’re using it for the winter, and then April (to) May is when your seasonal rentals are all done,” said Dana Cottrell, a realtor with Summit Resort Group and president of the Colorado Association of Realtors. “After Easter, things are dead. But listings start to go up because people are taking (their properties) off the rental market, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s time to sell.'”

Cottrell said springtime is also when homes “look the best,” which can matter a lot when the price tag is in the upper hundreds of thousands or in the millions.

“Single-family homes are harder to sell in the winter because you can’t see the roofs, you can’t see the landscaping, and those are two big things (people look for) in homes,” she said, adding that buyers now are less willing to pay for renovations than they were before the pandemic and instead are willing to shell more money on “properties that are ready for them.”

As interested buyers go through the sale process, the transactions themselves typically occur between August and September, Budd said. October and November typically present a “little breather” or shoulder season before the winter season begins.

However, it’s not clear whether this year’s spring inventory boom will follow the typical seasonal pattern because of the market’s volatility as of early 2025, characterized by a mix of rising inventories, fluctuating prices and shifting buyer dynamics.

“It’s really difficult to project with any comfort level what we’re gonna see (this year),” Budd said. “We’ve got a bunch of different variables floating around right now that are not historic. And, regretfully, to get reasonable forecasting it helps to have a historic base to work off of.”

Although Eagle County’s roughly 400 active listings are the highest Colorado Properties has seen for the region in a few years, the figure is still less than half of the region’s historical average for this time of year.

“We are definitely moving in the right direction as we move into the summer season, but until we start seeing the bump that comes with the summer season, it’s really difficult to project what that’s going to mean (for the market),” Budd said. “With all the macro-economic things that are going on at the moment, I don’t know whether we’re going to have the traditional demand that we would have in the spring moving into the summer.”

Snapshot: What does the market look like in Colorado’s ski resort towns?

Compared to this time last year, median prices are up 10.4%, listings are up “a hearty 47%” and sales are up 11% across Summit, Park and Lake counties, according to data from the Colorado Association of Realtors. In summary, “prices are up, portions are bigger, and everyone’s still hungry,” Cottrell wrote in a March newsletter.

On the surface level, this season’s inventory forecast looks promising. When looking at recent trends in listings and sales, however, the picture becomes somewhat muddy.

While the 47% jump in listings might make it seem like there’s been a significant increase in homes on the market, Cottrell said listing numbers were low enough by the mid-2023 that even a 50% jump wouldn’t come close to the listings the Western Slope housing market was seeing between 2018 and 2022.

“40%, or 50% of nothing is still pretty darn low,” she said. “When you look at the new listings and what’s going on in the market right now, yes, we are growing like crazy in terms of new listings … but we’re still not back to even the 2018 range, or even the lowest spike of new listings from when we first were dealing with COVID.”

In the last 10 years, new residential listings with Altitude MLS across Summit, Park, Routt, Lake and part of Grand counties hit their peak at 4,562 in April 2021, landing at a record low of 2,738 roughly two years in August 2023. For the month of March 2025, there are 3,762 new residential listings on the market.

Depending on how the market performs during the spring and summer seasons and into the next couple years, the region could be on track to recovering those pre-pandemic listings and sales, Cottrell added, but brokers aren’t holding their breath.

“Those stats, I could talk about them and say, ‘Wow, look at these stats. This is crazy. It’s so many more new listings.’ But realistically, we’re still pretty down,” Cottrell said.

Fortunately, all factors indicate signs of a balanced market — though the scales could easily lean toward a buyer’s market, as indicated by Altitude’s 5.7 months supply of homes for sale as of March.

“The increased inventory has brought the months of supply up to round figures — about six months — which is generally considered to be a stable market,” Budd said. “It says that inventory versus demand are reasonably in sync.”

With growing inventory, come growing prices

New listings are growing, but so are prices. 

March listings for single-family homes in Colorado’s Second Congressional District — which includes parts of Routt, Eagle, Summit and Grand counties — were 26% higher in 2025 than in the previous year, according to data from the Colorado Association of Realtors. For both single-family and townhouse units, the inventory of homes for sale grew by 26% and 32% consecutively.

On the flipside, the average sales price for single family homes increased by almost 14% in the same time period.

The upward trend is similar in Colorado’s Third Congressional District — which includes parts of Moffat, Garfield, Eagle and Pitkin counties — with the major differences being a larger increase for new townhouse listings (32%) and a 50% increase in their average sales price. The price increase for single-family homes was exactly 21%.

This means that while potential buyers in parts of the Western Slope have more choices and potential for negotiation than they did in 2023 — especially now that the number of listings far-exceed the number of sales — they continue to face climbing prices.

Roughly 47% of sales in Summit and Park countries during March were over $1 million, and 36% were cash deals, according to data from the Colorado Association of Realtors.

Now more than ever, a large portion of consumers are indicating feeling anxious about the rising cost of living, potentially leading them to adopt a “wait-and-see” approach regarding significant purchases like homes. Budd says the decision to wait should depend on the individual.

“If you need a place to live, if you’re somebody who’s in the area needs to transition or something, I would say (buy) sooner rather than later,” Mike said. If time isn’t an issue, he added, the rate of new construction in the state could indicate better-value homes for those who wait.

“But if interest rates don’t stabilize — and hopefully go down a bit — that new construction may not continue. It’s speculative,” he said.

Higher prices on new construction are also expected to be on their way thanks to President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on key construction materials like steel and aluminum, which economists with the National Association of Home Builders predict will raise the price of the average single-family home by over $9,000.

“Bottom Line: If you’re waiting for the market to cool like last night’s pizza — don’t hold your breath. The heat’s still on,” Cottrell wrote in her monthly newsletter.