The Equity & Exit Report

We pulled 2,161 single-family homes that sold in Adams, Arapahoe, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson counties, july 27 to august 24, 2026. This comes straight from the MLS, the same system agents use. We threw out 37 homes that had no starting price listed, because we could not measure anything on those.

Here is a weak spot, and you should know about it. Once a home sells, the MLS overwrites the asking price with the sale price. So for homes that dropped their price, we cannot always see what the last asking price actually was. For homes that never dropped their price, we can see it exactly — which is why our clean-sale count only uses those.

Five homes were marked as paying concessions but had no dollar amount typed in. Four more had amounts so large they were almost certainly typos. We still count all nine as “paid concessions,” but we leave them out when we calculate the typical dollar amount. We never turn a blank into a zero.

Question 2 splits the same MLS export by the condition box the listing agent checked: “updated/remodeled” against homes with no condition tag. That box does not tell us granite from laminate, and the per-ZIP groups are small — 11 to 37 homes over 30 days. We print the counts next to every number so you can weigh them yourself. Treat each ZIP’s split as a lead to check against the sold homes on your street.

Question 3 counts recorded loan documents — the same county records anyone can pull — matched to the 1,630 Front Range flippers in our buyer database. We count only loans classified as hard money, so banks and credit unions are excluded, and each lender counts once per flipper, never once per loan. Nobody paid to be on the list and nobody can. A loan count tells you who is active, not who is cheapest or who will treat you well.

We sold five houses in these five ZIP codes between May 27 and August 25, 2026. Where we built a page for the house, the address is a link. The others sold before we started making pages. We are not publishing what we paid for them.

It is your starting asking price, minus what the house actually sold for, plus whatever you paid in concessions. That is all. It does not include your agent commission, closing costs, taxes, loan interest, repairs, or the months you spent paying the mortgage. Your real loss is bigger than this number.

All three of these had to be true: the seller never dropped the price, the home sold for the asking price or more, and the seller paid no concessions. 210 homes out of 2,124 did all three — about 1 in 10. We require “never dropped the price” because that is the only group where we can see the real asking price with certainty. That makes our count conservative: if a seller dropped the price once and still got more than the new price, we counted it as a loss. The real number of clean sales is probably a little higher than 210.

We can see that cash buyers and clean sales show up together. We cannot prove the cash caused it. Cash buyers tend to buy certain kinds of houses at certain prices, so some of the difference is the house, not the money. That said, the reason makes plain sense: no loan means no bank appraisal, no bank repair list, and no loan fees for you to help cover. And the same pattern shows up on its own in the fixer numbers. We print the sample size next to every number so you can judge for yourself. Some of them are small — the fixer group is only 74 homes.

“Updated or remodeled” is just a box the listing agent checked. It does not prove the house was flipped. And we still cannot see what any of these sellers paid for their house, what they spent fixing it, or every price change along the way. So we cannot tell you what anyone made or lost overall.