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Quick links: Pre-foreclosures by county | Calls to foreclosure hotline up 47% | Reader poll | Colorado adds jobs| Startups, students awarded grants
Patrick Muldoon is closely watching the housing market around Colorado Springs and Pueblo. As a licensed real estate agent based in the area, it’s his job. But as someone who also specializes in bank-owned properties, the past year has been troubling.
“We’re starting to see buyers underwater. We knew that was coming. Delinquencies on the rise, and not just in housing. We’re seeing it in cars and credit cards and the rest,” said Muldoon, owner of Muldoon Associates. “But now we’re starting to see the NED filings increase across the Front Range. So gauging it as we go, my guess is that this is the start of more to come.”
NED stands for Notice of Election and Demand and is typically the bank’s first step in the foreclosure process. They’ve been on the rise for more than a year in El Paso County, he said. The county also had the most pre-foreclosures of Front Range counties so far this year, according to market researcher ATTOM, which tracks property data nationwide. While the number of homeowners facing foreclosure is just a fraction of levels during the Great Recession, things have changed in the past two years.
“Most of my clientele has been educated over the last four or five years, so they’re either not running into troubles now or they bought correctly, and that’s great,” Muldoon said. “But we are seeing a lot of delinquents starting to come into the market. You’re definitely going into subdivisions now with short sales, and I’m getting a lot of calls from other brokers (with) clients that are in trouble, three, four payments behind. Those are conversations we weren’t having 18 months ago.”
Compared with the rest of the nation, Colorado’s residential housing market is somewhere in the middle for the rise in pre-foreclosures, according to ATTOM, which analyzes county tax assessor data. The state had 1,945 pre-foreclosures during the second quarter, up 12% from a year ago.
Adams County had the highest jump, up 60% in a year to 283 properties. El Paso County’s pre-foreclosure filing rate was up just 4%, but the region was already high a year ago, with 307 so far this quarter. Pueblo County saw a 51% drop to 167 pre-foreclosures in the same period, but the county also had a high number of actual foreclosures, up 91% to 37.
Denver County also saw little change in pre-foreclosures, but with a high number of investor-owned properties, the county had the most vacant properties held by investors.
ATTOM data shows that foreclosures in the U.S., especially in vacant homes with no occupants (i.e.: zombie foreclosures), are up 18% from a year ago though down 8% from March, indicating that lenders are working through distressed properties where homeowners struggled with affordability. Foreclosure activity is well below what it was even before the pandemic, said Rob Barber, ATTOM’s CEO.
“Colorado’s residential vacancy rate remained below the national average in the second quarter, with 0.9% of homes sitting vacant compared to 1.3% nationwide,” Barber said in an email. “Meanwhile, Colorado’s zombie foreclosure rate rose to 3.8% of pre-foreclosure properties in Q2 2026, slightly above the national rate of 3.4% and up from 2.8% in the prior quarter and 2.6% a year earlier, in line with the majority of states that saw zombie foreclosures increase this quarter.”
Calls to state foreclosure hotline up 47%
“I need help avoiding foreclosure,” is the first topic in the homeowners section of Colorado Housing Connects, the nonprofit help line managed by Brothers Redevelopment. During the Great Recession, it was known as the Colorado Foreclosure Hotline. The number is 1-844-926-6632.
“We’ve seen a 47% jump in our volume related to people with questions around foreclosure or default in their mortgage,” so far this year compared with the same period a year ago, said Patrick Noonan, program director for Colorado Housing Connects.
From January to April, the organization recorded 1,739 contacts, with April the highest month since 2020. The second highest was January.
Such a sudden spike hasn’t been seen since the start of the pandemic. However, the overall numbers are much, much lower than when the Great Recession started in 2008.
“In the height of the (Great Recession) foreclosure crisis we may have received upwards of 3,500 to 4,500 inquiries in a month. And since 2020 we’ve had two of our busiest months — and that’s this year — and that’s been just over 450 inquiries,” he said.
About 80% of the calls are from folks who are concerned about their mortgage and are already in the hole. Typically, banks start the foreclosure process when a homeowner is 120 days late on paying their mortgage.
The top three counties for callers were Denver, with 240; Arapahoe County, with 177; and Adams County, at 160. According to Colorado Housing Connects, 35% of those seeking help with foreclosure prevention were 60 years or older, 54% identified as female-headed households and 34% had someone in the household with a disability. Roughly 33% identified as non-white.
The thing about missing a mortgage payment is that most homeowners have home equity, so options include refinancing, getting a home-equity loan or selling. But newer homeowners who stretched to afford a house did so when prices and interest rates peaked.
“If you purchased 10 years ago at a low interest rate, the price was much lower and maybe your income has gone up more quickly than your housing costs so you can weather that homeowners insurance or property tax increase,” Noonan said. “But for any homeowners that bought in the last couple of years, or people on a fixed income, those affordability challenges … are really just piling on.”
The average regular gas price in Colorado on Friday was $4.73 a gallon, up 21% from a month ago, and up 32% from a year ago, according to AAA. Home energy costs were up 13.2% in the Denver area in March compared with a year earlier, while overall consumer prices rose 4.2% in the same period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re seeing more and more people, especially as interest rates have risen over the last months and years, more people opting for an adjustable-rate mortgage are caught off guard when the interest rate rises and their housing cost increases,” he said. “But by and large, it doesn’t have the same tenor of 2008.”
The free foreclosure hotline provides counseling and resources and helps desperate homeowners statewide better understand options, such as a loan modification, whether partial payments are possible, or a short sale, which means selling a house for less than the value of the debt. Housing counselors can help talk through job loss and selling assets, or tapping one’s 401(k) plan.
But another part of the increase could be the end of the Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program, which was established with federal funds during the pandemic. Since 2022, Colorado provided $163.6 million to 10,100 Colorado households that faced hardship related to the pandemic. Households were eligible for a maximum of $40,000, according to the state Department of Local Affairs. That program ended last August.
The loss of the emergency mortgage assistance has been a challenge for local housing programs. And many are struggling themselves, Noonan said. Federal funding cuts and declines in philanthropic support for housing nonprofits has created a bleak situation if the economy sours even more.
“We’re seeing contractions in grants from private funders and so our network is really strained right now,” he said. “It’s a challenging time for the numbers to be going up because capacity across the state is strained.”
➔ Need housing help? Call Colorado Housing Connects at 1-844-926-6632 or visit coloradohousingconnects.org. The service is for homeowners, homebuyers, renters and landlords.
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Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ Trump administration releases $40 million for historic Colorado River water rights purchase. A Western Slope coalition has been working to buy the $99 million water rights at Shoshone Power Plant for years. They thought they had the money in 2025 — then it was frozen. >> Read story
➔ E-bike access to Maroon Bells now will cost riders. Bigger changes could be coming. A new e-bike fee signals the start of a larger change that could include Pitkin County taking over management of the Forest Service’s Maroon Bells Scenic Area. >> Read story
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Other working bits
➔ Colorado added jobs in April as unemployment rate stayed at 3.9%. The preliminary jobs report says that employers added 11,800 nonfarm payroll jobs, a kind of blockbuster number considering how the past year went. And March data wasn’t as bad as preliminarily reported, with 2,800 new jobs instead of a gain of 1,400 (job data revisions are ongoing and are typically updated as more employers respond late).
The most improved industry was in professional and business services, up 4,700, which are those office-type jobs, a niche that got hit hard when tech and finance companies nationwide went through rounds of layoffs. The arts and entertainment industry lost the most jobs last month, down 2,200.
But the number of people in the state’s labor force continued to shrink, down by 12,300 people in April to 3.215 million. The labor force participation rate declined to 66.1%, or the lowest since August 2020.
The metro areas of Fort Collins, Grand Junction and Greeley all have added jobs in the past year, with the Fort Collins area growing the most, at 1.5%. But the other major metro areas in the state have shrunk. Boulder declined the most at -0.7%.
Of the seven metro areas tracked in the state, Pueblo had the highest not-seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate at 5%, down from 5.4% a year ago; and Fort Collins had the lowest, at 3.2%, from 3.6% a year ago. The state’s unadjusted rate was 3.5%, down from 3.8% a year ago. The state’s adjusted unemployment rate for April was 3.9%. The U.S. rate was 4.3%.>> Job report details
➔ 36 awards for cutting-edge tech in Colorado. The state’s Advanced Industries Accelerator Program split $7.5 million in grants between 21 Colorado companies and 15 local researchers working on projects that could help Colorado’s economy grow, add jobs and improve the lives of residents.
The Proof of Concept grants of up to $150,000 each went to 15 teams of students at Colorado School of Mines, and University of Colorado and CU-Denver that are working on technologies from advanced gene therapies and space-debris detection to robots that can handle complex manufacturing and assembly tasks.
Early-stage grants of up to $250,000 were awarded to 21 companies, including Dream Face Technologies, which developed Ryan, the wellness robot. Ryan has been working at area senior-living communities to lead yoga classes and converse with residents when human employees are busy. (And Dream Face founder Mohammad Mahoor presented with Ryan at The Colorado Sun’s SunFest event this year.) >> Check out all the winners
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Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara
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