Huge swings in Colorado Springs housing prices in last two months

Shanna Lewis/KRCC News
Homes in the older sections of Colorado Springs are often more than a century old like these in the Old North End neighborhood. Not far away in Middle Shook’s Run the homes tend to be smaller.

It's been an up-and-down last few months for home prices in Colorado Springs.

In October, the median price for a single family home tied the summertime-high price of $485,000. By November, the price dropped to $466,000, the lowest since April. 

“To see that much of a drop between October and November was kind of a surprise to me," said Gordon Dean, Chair-Elect of the Pikes Peak Association of Realtors. 

He said some higher end homes hitting the market in October may have contributed to a jump in prices.

This year has been a rough one for both home sellers and buyers. Mortgage interest rates are currently sitting at around 7.5-percent, well over double rates two years ago. 

Dean said one national bright spot has been new homes sales. Homebuilders were hit particularly hard when labor shortages and pandemic-fueled supply chain woes pushed up prices for raw materials. Dean said homebuilders have adapted to work with lenders offering financial tools to ease those high rates. 

“They're advertising right up front that if you use their preferred lenders, they're able to negotiate or buy-down that interest rate for the buyer, and they're advertising those rates of under 6-percent,” he said, “Which I think…is going to be the magic ticket in the springtime.”

Dean said the Pikes Peak Association of Realtors has also been working to connect buyers of existing homes with that sort of financing as well.

“The mortgage companies that aren't adapting or making these things more appealing to our buyers, we're not maintaining those relationships because our buyers want to buy,” he said. 

However, even with the lower prices in November, the state’s second-largest real estate market saw the lowest number of single family homes sold in any month this year.