Is Your Westside Home Priced to Sell or Priced to Sit?

I am going to share a number that stopped me mid-coffee last month. During a single week in April, 543 Colorado Springs homes had their asking price cut. Only 453 new listings came on the market that same week. Read that again: more homes got cheaper than homes came available. That is not the market screaming "distress" -- it is the market correcting something very specific. Sellers started too high, and buyers said no thank you and moved on.

This is the conversation I am having every week right now, and it is mostly with people who want to sell but have not yet listed. They are watching their neighbor's house sit for 60 days and wondering what went wrong. The answer is almost always the same: the price was set based on what the seller wanted to net, not on what buyers are actually willing to pay in this particular zip code, in this particular condition, in this particular season.

Buyers in 2026 Are Comparison Shoppers

The buyers I am working with right now are not in a hurry. They have options. Inventory in Colorado Springs is up about 19% year-over-year, which means they can afford to walk past your home and look at the next one. In 2021, buyers were writing offers before they had seen a house in person. That is not happening today. Today they are opening tabs, comparing price per square foot across four or five homes in the same neighborhood, and asking really good questions about what has been updated and what has not.

On the Westside specifically, this dynamic matters even more. Zip codes 80904 and 80919 have historically held their value better than many parts of the city because of the proximity to Garden of the Gods, Monument Valley Park, and Manitou. But that lifestyle premium only justifies so much. I have watched homes in Rockrimmon (80919) sit for 90-plus days not because anything was wrong with them, but because the seller anchored to a 2022 comp that does not reflect today's absorption rate.

What Overpricing Actually Costs You

This table is a simplified illustration, but the pattern it shows is real and I see it repeatedly. When a home sits, buyers start to wonder what is wrong with it. There does not have to be anything wrong with it -- but perception is its own reality in real estate. Every week a home sits, the seller loses negotiating leverage, and the buyer who eventually makes an offer knows they have the upper hand.

What This Means If You Are Thinking About Rightsizing

A lot of the sellers I work with are Baby Boomers who have lived in their Westside home for 15 or 20 years. They have real equity -- often significant equity -- and they are thinking about rightsizing into something smaller, lower maintenance, and better suited to where they are in life. That is a smart move in a market like this one, but it requires timing the pricing conversation correctly on both ends.

Here is what I tell those clients: your home's value is what a motivated buyer will pay for it today, given today's interest rates (currently around 6.5% on a 30-year fixed), today's competing inventory, and today's buyer expectations about condition. If you priced it in your head based on what your friend sold for in 2022, we have some recalibrating to do -- and that is not a criticism, it is just math. The good news is that Westside homes in solid condition, priced accurately, are still selling. The days-on-market number has ticked up to about 20 days citywide, but well-priced homes are not sitting anywhere near that long.

The Two Types of Sellers Right Now

I am seeing two distinct camps among would-be sellers. The first group prices based on data, prepares the home thoughtfully (I have been doing fix-and-flip renovations since 2004, so I know exactly what is worth doing and what is not), and gets to closing relatively quickly. The second group starts optimistic, sits on the market, reluctantly reduces, and ends up netting less than they would have with an accurate price from day one.

The irony is that both sellers often start the conversation saying the same thing: "I am not in a hurry." But the second group almost always ends up feeling like they left money on the table, because they did. The right price does not mean cheap. It means calibrated. Those are very different things.

If you are thinking about selling your Westside home in the next six to twelve months, the most valuable thing I can do for you is put a real number on it -- not a range designed to make you feel good, but a specific, defensible price backed by current Westside data. That conversation is free, it takes about 45 minutes, and it will almost certainly change how you think about your timeline.