Denver Condos Are Down 14 Percent, And Fannie Mae Just Made It Worse

A typical Denver condo used to sell in about a week. This was June 2022. You listed it, you got offers near asking, you were packing boxes by the weekend.

Fast forward to June 2026. That same condo sits for almost seven weeks and closes about 5% below where it started.

That is the whole story in two sentences. But the numbers underneath it are worse than most people owning attached homes on the Front Range realize, and there is a second problem stacking on top of the first one that almost nobody is talking about.

The prices have been sliding for four straight years

Here is the part people miss. This is not a one bad quarter thing. Denver agent Cooper Thayer ran the analysis, and Denverite and The Real Deal both picked it up in early August. Median condo values across the Denver region are down 14.3% from the 2022 peak of $370,000.

And it has bled out year after year. $350,000 in 2023. $340,000 in 2024. $325,000 in 2025. Roughly $317,000 through July 20 of this year. That is not a dip. That is a trend line pointing at the floor.

The sales volume is the scary one though. Through June 2026, only 992 condos had closed. That puts the whole year on pace for about 2,005 sales. You know the last time Denver saw condo numbers that low? 2008. I mean, that is the comparison, and it is not a fun one.

The August DMAR report, working off July data, pegged attached condos and townhomes at a $380,000 median with almost six months of supply sitting out there. Detached homes? About three months. Attached listings linger a median of 40 days. Single family sells in 17. So the gap between houses and condos is not small anymore. It is a canyon.

The New Door Group put out their weekly update on August 22 and called condos the softest segment in the market. A 51% concession rate. Roughly half of contracts taking more than 60 days just to find a buyer. Sellers are paying to get out.

Now the Fannie Mae part, which is the real problem

So values are down. Fine. Markets move. But here is what changes the math completely.

Most condo buyers need a conventional loan, and a conventional loan means Fannie Mae has to bless the building, not just the buyer. And Fannie Mae has been quietly tightening the screws all year.

Effective August 2026, they killed the Limited Review path. That was the shortcut. It let a lot of solid buildings skip the deep financial dig. Gone. Now every condo project needs full HOA financial documentation, every time.

Then there is the insurance test. As of July 1, Fannie Mae capped the master-insurance deductible at $50,000. Go above that and the building fails. Just fails. And this one is brutal in Colorado specifically, because HOA master insurance premiums here have gone up somewhere between 200% and 500% in recent years. Hail, wildfire risk, construction litigation. So exactly the buildings getting hammered on insurance are the ones most likely to trip the new rule.

There is more coming. For loan applications dated on or after January 4, 2027, the reserve funding floor jumps from 10% to 15% of the annual HOA budget. So your HOA needs to be socking away half again as much as before or the building stops qualifying. And back on March 18, they retired the 50% investor-concentration cap, which cuts a different way, but the overall direction is one thing. Tighter.

And the killer, the one that stops a sale cold. Any condo flagged for construction-defect, structural, or safety litigation is non-warrantable until that litigation is fully resolved. No conventional loan. Period. In Colorado, where construction-defect suits are basically a genre, that is a lot of buildings frozen in place.

You want to know how bad it already is? As of early 2025, Colorado ranked third in the entire country for condo projects on Fannie Mae's ineligibility list. The blacklist. About 210 projects. Only Florida (1,398) and California (695) had more. Third in the nation. That was before this summer's rule changes even landed.

What this actually means if you own one

Put the two things together. Prices already down 14%, and financing getting yanked out from under whole buildings at the same time. If your building lands on that ineligibility list, your buyer pool shrinks to cash buyers and portfolio lenders overnight. Cash buyers want a discount. That is how you get a 51% concession rate.

So if you own a condo on the Front Range, this is the question that matters more than the paint color or the granite. Does your HOA pass? What is the deductible on the master policy. What are the reserves at. Is there any litigation. That paperwork is now worth more than the countertops, and I am only half joking.

There is one bright spot, and it is at the very top. The Waldorf Astoria Residences in Cherry Creek reported over 70% of units presold as the project was still coming out of the ground. That was the Denver Gazette on August 7. Luxury cash buyers do not care what Fannie Mae thinks. But that is a tiny slice of a very big market, and it does not help the person trying to sell a $317,000 unit in a building with a $75,000 deductible.

Look, condos have always been the on-ramp. First place a lot of people buy. Right now that on-ramp is closing lane by lane, and the rules doing it are written in fine print almost nobody reads until the deal falls apart at underwriting. Check your building. Do it before you list, not after.