Who Is Actually Buying Colorado Springs Homes?

A housing market can detach from local wages only when the people buying it do not depend on local wages. So the most honest question about any market is a simple one: who is actually buying? The Marginal Buyer Index answers it for Colorado Springs, from El Paso County assessor records on the homes that sold here in the last year.

Of the 10,109 homes that sold in the last twelve months, here is who bought them.

At 85 out of 100, Colorado Springs is overwhelmingly an owner-occupier market. Five in six recent buyers live in what they bought. Outside capital is about 4.0 percent, a rounding error next to the 20 to 30 percent that institutional and investor buyers have reached in parts of the financialized Sunbelt. When the price-setter earns a local paycheck, the market stays tied to local wages, and the rent-and-income relationship holds.

The index over time, and the one time it moved

The owner-occupant share has held between about 80 and 88 percent for more than a decade. It moved meaningfully exactly once: in 2021, when out-of-state buyers jumped to 8.8 percent and entity-owned purchases spiked, pulling the index down. That was the money flood of 2021 and 2022 reaching Colorado Springs, outside capital chasing a market everyone wanted. It did not last. By 2024 the index was back above 85 and outside capital had receded. The financialization pulse hit here too, briefly, and then the local owner-occupier market reasserted itself.

Why it matters

This is the instrument behind a bigger question: can housing become the stock market, detached from the real economy and backstopped by money? The answer depends on who the marginal buyer is. A market bought by capital can float away from local wages. A market bought by owner-occupants cannot, for long, because the buyer has to make the payment from a local paycheck, and that paycheck is anchored to rent and income. Colorado Springs, at 85, is firmly the second kind. That is the same reason the cost to own here stays tethered to rent: the people buying are the people who have to live with the payment.