Are Denver Home Prices Up or Down? Compared With When?

Are Denver home prices going up or down?

It’s a reasonable question. Before answering it, though, there’s another question worth asking:

Compared with when?

Compared with last quarter? Last year? The year you bought your home?

Those are different questions, and they can produce very different answers. A market can be below a recent high and still be above where it stood several years earlier. Neither comparison tells the whole story on its own.

That’s why I’ve created a new resource for The Granger Report: Denver Metro Home Appreciation. The interactive page brings together the metro’s price history from 1991 through the second quarter of 2026, with a chart, year-by-year changes, and the underlying data available to explore.

My goal is to give you a place to step back, ask questions, and put the numbers into perspective.

Here’s where I’d begin.

Open the page and find “When did you buy your home?” Choose your purchase year to see how the Denver Metro index has changed since the fourth quarter of that year. For example, choosing 2020 starts the comparison at the end of 2020, not your actual closing date. Purchases in 2026 are too recent for this feature.

Then try a different year.

The point isn’t to decide who bought at the “right” time. It’s to notice how much the starting point matters.

Think about someone who has owned a home for fifteen years and someone who purchased much more recently. The same market headline could raise very different questions for each of them.

For one, the question might be, “How does this recent change fit into the years I’ve owned?”

For the other, it might be, “What would this mean if I needed to move sooner than I expected?”

Both deserve more than a blanket statement that the market is up or down.

I don’t believe a long-term chart should be used to wave away a short-term concern.

If you recently purchased a home and your circumstances have changed, being told to “look at the long run” may not answer the question you actually need help with.

The reverse is also worth considering. A negative headline about the past year does not, by itself, describe everything that has happened since you purchased.

I want this resource to help you make that distinction. Not to convince you to buy or sell, but to help you investigate before drawing a conclusion.

This distinction matters.

The page uses the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s purchase-only House Price Index. That index tracks price changes using repeat sales of eligible single-family properties with mortgages acquired or securitized by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. It does not represent every transaction or every property type, and condominiums are excluded from this series.

In other words, I would not take the percentage on the chart, apply it to your purchase price, and call that your home’s value.

Understanding an individual property requires a closer look at its location, condition, size, features, and comparable sales in its market. Those property-specific comparisons are a different exercise from following a metro-wide index.

There’s another important distinction: price appreciation is not the same as profit. The index is not adjusted for inflation, and a price-change calculation does not subtract your mortgage interest, maintenance expenses, or transaction costs.

I’d use the chart as background for a conversation, not as a substitute for looking at your particular home and circumstances.

You don’t need to be planning a move to be curious about the housing market.

Perhaps you want to understand the years since you purchased. Perhaps you’re considering your first home and want more context. Or perhaps you simply enjoy learning about the place you live.

Start with a year that matters to you. Look at the surrounding years. Ask what the chart helps explain and what it leaves unanswered.

That’s the kind of work I want The Granger Report to do: make useful information easier to explore, explain its limits, and help you ask better questions.

Curious about your own neighborhood? I’m happy to put together a complimentary Real Estate Review using recent nearby sales and homes currently for sale. You don’t have to be thinking about selling to start that conversation.