Art by Larry Day

In the Roaring Fork Valley housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years. That’s a common headline, old news and perhaps even an understatement.
A Forbes article received a lot of social media engagement after being posted on the Carbondale Facebook page, and for good reason. In the Sept. 26 Forbes article, “Cities where home values have grown the most over the last 20 years,” Carbondale ranked number one.
Notably, Rifle and Glenwood Springs also made the list, ranking 13 and 19, respectively. According to the article, the median home value in Carbondale in 2004 was $256,998 compared to today at $1,440,404. Data for the article was sourced from Zillow’s home value index.
The span of the article stretches from 2004, when subprime loans became available. Those loans financed borrowers who didn’t necessarily have the means at higher interest rates, reflecting that associated risk to lenders, leading to the mortgage crisis.
Since he was elected as the County Assessor in 2010, Jim Yellico has seen the housing market recover from the price drops of the recession and then exponentially trend higher. Looking back, he noted an approximate 35-50% drop in home values during the mortgage crisis and subsequent recession.
“By the time it was all said and done, from those two events, values were at their lowest,” Yellico told The Sopris Sun. “By the 2013 assessment year … values had gone down from their highs by 50%” — a ballpark figure, he acknowledged. “Since then, we’ve recovered back to those prices, plus another 10-25%.”
The following year, 2014, is when the market started steadily increasing year over year. “Values have almost doubled since the low point in 2013,” stated Yellico.
The Assessor’s Office conducts property valuations — reappraisals — every even year and delivers those assessed results every odd year. So the last time assessed values were sent to homeowners was in May of 2023, based on the assessed values of June 30, 2022. “That is the Colorado state procedure,” Yellico clarified. The only reason the county values homes is for property taxation purposes.
He explained the reappraisal process. “We look for market trends based on actual sales. So we take all the sales that happen in the county and narrow those down to specific areas — we won’t use a sale that happened in Carbondale to value a home in Parachute, because every area has its own market.” He continued, “Then we take all of the information … put it into our mass-appraisal model and it assigns changes to every property in that area.”
He added, “The biggest spike that we’ve seen since I’ve been here was this last reappraisal.”
Between 2019 and 2021, values increased by 15% in Carbondale. From 2021 to 2023, Carbondale values increased again by 33%. Interestingly, Parachute has trended in the opposite direction, increasing by 31% from 2019 to 2021, and only by 19% from 2021 to 2023.
The Assessor’s Office is in the middle of processing the 2025 reappraisal. Yellico said it looks like it will be another increase over 2023, noting that sales have significantly dropped as well.
What’s the reason? As with most socioeconomic questions, there’s no simple answer. The recent increase, in part, is due to the pandemic and the onset of remote working. People with the means want to move to this area and can continue to make a substantial income.
Interest rates have also gone up, making it not only harder for people to buy their first home but for current homeowners to sell and make a move. Homeowners locked in at a low interest rate are often dissuaded from selling because buying a new property would come with a higher interest rate.
The Forbes article relates the increase to nearby Aspen, reading, “Originally an agricultural and mining town, Carbondale began to have its home values pulled more and more upward by nearby Aspen, eventually becoming a bedroom community to Aspen.” And that’s not wrong. Being down the road from one of the most expensive places, homes in Carbondale may appear to be a good deal.
Also touched upon in the article is that there is an increasing number of second, third and fourth homes in Carbondale.
While the Assessor’s Office doesn’t track which properties are second homes, from Yellico’s observations that figure has gone up. And there have, of course, been some efforts to make such a distinction at the state level. Proposition HH, which was shot down by Colorado voters last year, would have resulted in taxing unoccupied homes differently and, therefore, accounting for those types of homes specifically.
Another state issue that’s gotten attention is that the development of condominiums, ostensibly an option for first-time homebuyers, has become less and less common. This is largely due to the state’s construction defects laws which exposes developers to litigation and effectively reduces the number of bids for condominiums.