A friend of mine spent a Saturday in July touring two-bedroom condos in the Golden Triangle, expecting a fight. She'd read that Denver condo sales were up 81 percent and figured she'd be competing with cash offers by lunchtime. Instead she toured four units, each one sitting well past its original list date, two with price cuts already posted, and left with a business card and zero urgency from any of the listing agents.
That gap between what she read and what she saw isn't a fluke. It's the whole story.
The Number Everyone Is Quoting
The Denver Metro Association of Realtors released its July 2026 Market Trends Report on August 6, and one line traveled fast: luxury attached homes, meaning condos and townhomes priced at $1 million or more, saw sales jump 26.09 percent from June and 81.25 percent from July of last year. There were 29 of those sales in July, up from 23 in June and just 16 a year earlier, according to reporting in the Denver Gazette. Coverage from ColoradoBiz confirmed the same figures straight from the DMAR report itself.
Meanwhile the broader Denver Metro market was doing the opposite. Total closed sales fell 11.81 percent from June to 3,667 homes, and the metro-wide median price actually dropped 1.54 percent from June to $605,000, even though that figure was still up 2.95 percent from July 2025. New listings fell 5.32 percent from June. Homes that did sell took a median of 21 days, three days slower than June but still faster than the 24-day median from a year earlier.
So one number says condos are hot. The other says everything, including condos as a category, is cooling. Both are true. They're just describing different buildings.
The Building Behind the Number
More than 70 percent of the 37 units at Waldorf Astoria Residences Cherry Creek are already sold, and the project is still coming out of the ground at East Second Avenue and St. Paul Street, per the Denver Gazette's August 7 coverage. That single presale project, Colorado's first Waldorf Astoria-branded property, is doing a disproportionate share of the work behind July's luxury condo spike.
The pricing history tells its own story about how that happened. When Hilton and developer PMG first announced the project, they quoted a starting price of $1.2 million. By the time the sales gallery opened, the entry point being advertised had climbed to $2.3 million. Today, the eight units still on the market start at $4.7 million. That's not the building getting more expensive over time so much as the cheaper units selling first and the remaining inventory skewing toward penthouses and top floors. If you're reading "Waldorf Astoria condos start at $4.7 million" today, you're looking at what's left, not what the building actually cost to buy into a year ago.
One sale in the same corner of Cherry Creek shows how fast this segment is moving for buyers who are already in it. A penthouse at 155 Steele Street sold in five days for $5.4 million, $150,000 over asking, according to the Denver Gazette. Six years earlier, a comparable unit in that same building sold for $4 million, well below its list price, after 111 days on the market. That's the kind of before-and-after that makes a market feel like it's on fire, and at that specific address, in that specific month, it was.
What the Rest of the Condo Market Actually Looks Like
Step outside the $1 million-plus tier and the numbers reverse completely. Attached homes overall, meaning every condo and townhome sale regardless of price, carried a median price of $380,000 in July, down 2.56 percent from both June and from July 2025. Median days on market for that broader segment stretched to 40, roughly double the pace of the luxury tier, with about 5.7 months of supply on hand. Attached-home sales as a category fell 12.18 percent year over year.
Put another way: the typical Denver condo buyer, the one shopping in the $300,000 to $500,000 range that makes up the bulk of the attached-home market, is in a buyer's market right now. Sellers in that tier are facing longer waits and softer pricing while a small number of buyers at the top are moving in days and paying over asking.
DMAR's Market Trends Committee chair, Amanda Snitker, put the inventory picture in context for the metro as a whole. Today's 13,115 active listings remain well below the 20,000-plus this market carried routinely between 2008 and 2012, she noted, which means the market isn't oversupplied by historical standards. It's simply no longer scarce. That framing matters for anyone assuming more listings automatically means a weak market. It doesn't. It means buyers finally have room to be selective, and in the condo segment specifically, that selectivity is showing up as slower sales and price concessions almost everywhere except Cherry Creek North.
Cherry Creek Isn't One Market Either
Even within the neighborhood driving the luxury headline, the range is wide enough that "Cherry Creek condo" doesn't mean much on its own. The Laurel, an established building at Steele Street and East 2nd Avenue, carries a median price around $1.5 million and saw its penthouse sell for $10.1 million in October 2025. NorthCreek, a newer development near Fillmore Street, starts around $1.8 million with penthouse listings that have reached $21 million. And a penthouse nicknamed the "Cherry Creek Sky Palace" relaunched in April 2026 at $16 million after previously being marketed at $21 million, positioning it to challenge a $15 million single-family sale from January 2025 as one of the priciest deals the metro has recorded, according to Hoodline.
None of that top-tier activity tells a buyer shopping at $700,000 what to expect on carrying costs, and the carrying costs vary just as widely. HOA fees on Cherry Creek condos generally run from around $500 a month on the low end to more than $2,000 a month at the highest-amenity buildings, depending on staffing, reserve funding, and what utilities are bundled in. A buyer comparing two units at similar purchase prices can end up with meaningfully different monthly costs once that fee is added to the mortgage, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost when a headline stat lumps every attached home into one category.
What This Means If You're Shopping Right Now
A few things follow directly from this split, whether you're the buyer or the agent guiding one:
Don't let a segment stat set your expectations for the whole market. The 81 percent figure describes 29 transactions concentrated heavily around one address. If you're not shopping at that price point, that stat tells you almost nothing about your own negotiating position.
In the sub-$1 million condo market, buyers currently have leverage. With attached-home days on market stretching to 40 and roughly 5.7 months of supply on hand as of July 2026, sellers outside the luxury tier are more likely to entertain price discussions than headlines suggest.
If you are shopping presale luxury inventory, ask what's left, not what it started at. The Waldorf Astoria's jump from a $1.2 million opening price to a current entry point of $4.7 million reflects unit mix, not appreciation. Any presale building will show the same pattern as its cheaper units sell first.
Get the HOA financials before you fall for the view. A $2,000-a-month fee at a full-service tower buys concierge staff, reserve funding, and amenities you'd otherwise pay for separately. A $500-a-month fee at an under-reserved building can turn into a special assessment the moment a roof or elevator needs work. Ask for the reserve study and recent meeting minutes before you write an offer, not after.
FAQ
Does the luxury condo jump mean Denver's overall condo market is recovering? Not based on the July 2026 data. The $1 million-plus tier posted its strongest month in years, but the broader attached-home category, which includes the vast majority of condo listings, saw prices and sales volume decline over the same period.
Should I wait for prices to drop further before buying a condo below $1 million? That depends on your timeline and the specific building, not a citywide trend. With 5.7 months of supply in the attached-home segment as of July 2026, sellers in that range already have reason to negotiate rather than hold firm.
Will more presale buildings create the same effect as Waldorf Astoria? Possibly, if a comparably branded project launches with strong presales. The mechanism is straightforward: a handful of high-dollar closings in a short window can move a small statistical category a large percentage, even when the rest of the market is flat or declining.
How do I compare HOA fees across different Cherry Creek buildings? Ask for the current budget, the reserve study, and a record of any special assessments in the past two years for each building you're considering, then calculate total monthly carrying cost, not just the sticker price of the fee itself.
Whether you're closing on a presale unit at the top of the market or negotiating a condo that's been sitting for six weeks, the mechanics of escrow don't change with the price tag. First Alliance Title has closed both kinds of Denver transactions from its Cherry Creek office, and our team can walk you through what a building's HOA documents and title commitment actually mean for your closing timeline before you're staring down a deadline.
