Friday Update June 5, 2026

Happy Friday!  We're walking into the weekend and into June with 2,345 existing single family homes on the market here in El Paso County.  That is up about 10% since May and we should be getting to peak inventory here in the next 45-60 days or so, in theory.

Year over year the market is remarkably sideways.

May of 2025 total active inventory including new builds was 3,671 units, 1,166 sales for a median price of $490,000.

May of 2026 total active inventory including new builds was 3,667 units, 1,251 sales for a median price of $499,952.

May of 2024 was also 499k, May of 2020 the median was $350,000.

Rates spiked at the end of February and have been reluctant to come down since.  The war and oil prices are a big part of it but also economic data keeps coming out looking surprisingly good giving the market no reason to expect rate cuts.  

I don't think I've seen a weirder market in my 13 years of doing this.  Examples.  I have a fixed up starter home fully remodeled at barely over 300k that gets 0 showings.  It is by far the cheapest house in the area.

Meanwhile my partner had a deal terminate at 685k over nothing to get 3 offers on that house the same day and go 31k over list price.  That house sat for about a week and originally went under contract under list price.

Days on market over all is up consistently across El Paso County but there are some quick sales happening with multiple offer scenarios.  My wife who is an appraiser doesn't share addresses with me but does often tell me things like "wow, all the comps are like 10% above this sales price".

So we are seeing some motivated sellers under cutting comps by a solid 5-10% and getting quick sales.  Like comps at 500k and listing at 450k to sell for say 465k or so is what we're seeing.

Talking to  a buddy the other day who primarily deals in REOs and distressed properties.  He has like 100 of them with something like 30 of them listed for sale.  He's been in the industry a lot longer than I have and dude said one thing recently that stuck.  We have a market right now specifically on the lower end that is struggling.  There are a few motivated sellers that are undercutting it and getting out while the average seller holds on to a price and lingers.  What he said that stood out is just imagine a market where REOs do begin to saturate and become your competition.  The banks have no feelings or attachments or hope.  They just cut price until the unit sells and that's that.  What that does to neighborhood values isn't a concern to them.

Now with that in mind and some of the recent headlines talking about sky rocketing foreclosures, that's all kind of misleading.  Right now Colorado has a foreclosure rate of roughly 1 house out of every 3,850.  That is statistically basically a 0.  I'm looking at a Division of Housing report from 2007.  El Paso County had a foreclosure rate of 1 out of every 254 and Pueblo at 1 out of every 152.  This is 2007 and things got worse until about 2011.  But the point is that we are a very long way away from seeing those numbers as we stand today and the biggest reason for that, in my opinion, is that our policy makers embraced inflation as an economic policy.  Our foreclosure numbers now sit somewhere right around pre covid levels.  It would be helpful if the el paso county trustee did their job publishing stats but the last publication from them was in February which I shared with you.

It is hard to overlook the main factor that influences inflation.  The amount of money in a system.  We have quietly surpassed our 2022 highs in M2 money supply and are continuing this very questionable exponential path.  This graph doesn't look very exponential.  But this one?  More so.

All wars, economic indicators, stock markets all time highs and crypto sell offs aside.  The correlation between the cost of housing and M2 money supply is one of the strongest correlations that exists.  That does not mean that housing can not have crashes, corrections, opportunities within it.  What it means is that if M2 money continues to get printed so too the price of housing will overall drift up.  As will the cost of burgers and beers which at this point already have me pondering sobriety and veganism.

The market is in a weird spot for sure.  I'm sitting on more active listings than I ever have in my life.  The brokerage is sitting on more inventory than we've ever had.  Yet we have some units getting multiple offers, one last week, one this week.  And many more not getting a single showing.

Help me make sense of that while I take the rest of the day off and take my son swimming.