How Have Redhill Forest Property Values Performed?

Redhill Forest owners often turn to real estate websites to get a feel of the market and how it relates to their own sense of their property value. It's a reasonable way of getting a snapshot of the moment.

However, trying to determine how a property has performed over a period of time is more complicated. Recently, I visited with a neighbor who bought their lot over forty years ago and last year fulfilled their dream by building a home to be enjoyed by three generations of their family. "We paid $6,000 for the lot and at $50 a month that was all we could afford."

How Redhill Forest owners think about their property purchase often is determined by their desires, the economy, and the year of purchase. Some, like my neighbor, always contemplated a dream house. Others, simply saw buying a lot as an inexpensive way to purchase access to a world-class trout stream. Others, improved their lot for RV camping as a rate far less than Tiger Run in Breckenridge (current average of $360,000) or Campground of the Rockies (current average of $60,000).

The average selling price for single-family homes in Redhill Forest generally ranges between $620,000 and $680,000.

Redhill Forest Market Snapshot

• Average Single-Family Home Price: ~$635,000 – $675,000

• Typical Price Range for Existing Homes: $575,000 – $870,000+

• Vacant Lots / Land (1.5–5 Acres): $50,000 – $150,000

Property & Lot Sizes: Homes in Redhill Forest sit on generous acreage (typically 1 to 3+ acres), which adds significant land value compared to standard high-density mountain subdivisions.

Newer Builds vs. Older Cabins: Older, established mountain homes generally sell in the upper $500ks to mid-$600ks, while newly constructed homes or larger modern mountain properties reach $700,000 to $870,000+. There are now several newer homes in Redhill Forest valued over $1 million.

A deeper statistical dive

Analysis of over 6,000 records from 2012–2024, Compared to Warm Springs and Indian Mountain Data source: Park County, CO Assessor records

Redhill Forest’s property values have risen faster than two comparable Park County subdivisions over the past decade-plus, based on actual recorded sale prices — not county assessed values, which lag the market and were distorted by a large statewide reassessment jump in 2023. Warm Springs and Indian Mountain were chosen based on their geographic proximity (west and east of Redhill Forest) and that they are both subdivisions with HOA's.

• Vacant land (the majority of Redhill lots) appreciated at roughly 15–16% per year from 2012–2024, versus about 5–7% per year in Indian Mountain, the closest comparable community by lot size and land-use history.

• A second, independent method — comparing the same parcel’s price to itself across repeat sales — confirms the direction and shows an even wider gap: Redhill vacant lots appreciated 10.5% per year and Redhill homes 16.3% per year in recent repeat sales (2018 or later), both well ahead of Indian Mountain and Warm Springs.

• Warm Springs, which many owners think of as a natural comparison, turns out to be a poor land-value comparison: it is overwhelmingly built out (86% of its sales are homes, not lots) and has too few vacant-land sales per year to generate a reliable trend.

• A data-quality review during this analysis found that Park County’s own "Qualified Sale" flag excludes many legitimate arm’s-length sales — after spot checks; the analysis was rebuilt using a broader, independently-verified definition of a market sale, which held up and if anything strengthened these findings. See §2.3.

• This analysis establishes what has happened to property values. It does not, by itself, prove why — that is a matter of judgment for the Board and ownership to weigh alongside the specific investments made (road maintenance, the 2012 water system) and broader market conditions.

1. Findings: How Redhill Forest Has Performed, 2012–2024

All figures below come from actual recorded sale prices for genuine arm’s-length transactions in Park County Assessor records (see §2.3 for how "genuine" is defined) — not county assessed values, which typically lag two to three years behind market prices and are reset only every other year.

1.1 Vacant Land

Vacant lots make up the majority of Redhill Forest’s sales activity and are the most relevant metric for most owners, since most Redhill lots remain unimproved.

Community	2012 median $/acre	2024 median $/acre	Annual growth (CAGR)
Redhill Forest	$6,100 (n=14)	$34,375 (n=33)	15.5%
Indian Mountain	$7,282 (n=27)	$17,000 (n=77)	7.3%
Warm Springs	insufficient data	insufficient data	not usable — see §2.4

Median sale price per acre, verified market vacant-land sales, by year. n = number of sales that year.

This gap holds up when the comparison is restricted to a matched lot-size band (1.5–4 acres, Redhill’s core lot size), which rules out the possibility that Indian Mountain’s occasional larger parcels (up to 40 acres) were dragging down its per-acre average:

Community	2012 median $/acre	2024 median $/acre	Annual growth (CAGR)
Redhill Forest	$4,430 (n=10)	$26,099 (n=25)	15.9%
Indian Mountain	$9,257 (n=21)	$15,853 (n=46)	4.6%

Same comparison, restricted to 1.5–4 acre lots only.

1.2 Homes (Improved Parcels)

The simple year-by-year comparison of home sale prices is less conclusive than the vacant-land result, and should be read with more caution: Redhill has far fewer home sales per year (often single digits) than Indian Mountain or Warm Springs, so a single unusually priced sale can swing the annual median. This table also excludes any sale that occurred before a parcel’s recorded construction date, since several "home" sales in the raw county data actually turned out to be pre-construction land sales (see §2.3).

Community	2012 median price	2024 median price	Annual growth (CAGR)
Redhill Forest	$196,112 (n=4)	$520,000 (n=11)	8.5%
Indian Mountain	$153,000 (n=23)	$541,000 (n=33)	11.1%
Warm Springs	$160,000 (n=19)	$600,000 (n=15)	11.6%

Median verified market sale price, genuine post-construction home sales, by year.

Taken at face value, this table suggests Redhill homes have not outpaced the comps — but this simple comparison is distorted by “which houses happened to sell that year,” especially with samples this thin. Section 1.3 resolves this with a method that isn’t sensitive to that problem.

1.3 A Stronger Cross-Check: Repeat Sales

The most reliable way to measure appreciation is to compare a property to itself: find every Redhill, Warm Springs, and Indian Mountain parcel that sold more than once, and calculate the annualized price change between each pair of sales for that same parcel. This eliminates the risk that a given year’s comparison is skewed by which specific properties happened to change hands that year.

Restricting to repeat-sale pairs where the second sale occurred in 2018 or later (the period most relevant to current owners), the same-parcel comparison shows Redhill clearly ahead of both comparable communities on both property types — and by a wider margin than the simple cross-sectional numbers alone suggest:

Median annualized appreciation, same-parcel repeat sales, second sale in 2018 or later.

This repeat-sales result is the strongest single piece of evidence in this analysis: it controls for property mix, relies on large sample sizes (46–517 repeat-sale pairs per cell), and is the only method here in which Redhill homes clearly outperform the comps, resolving the more muted signal from the simple annual-median comparison in §1.2.

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Methodology

2.1 Data Source

All data comes from the Park County, CO Assessor’s public records (qpublic.schneidercorp.com), pulled directly via the Sales Search tool. Each record reflects an individual recorded transaction: parcel ID, sale date, sale price, deed/instrument type, the county’s own "Qualified Sale" designation, acreage, property class, year built, and square footage. Three datasets were pulled, covering every Redhill Forest filing (FLG 1–5), all of Warm Springs, and all 27 filings of Indian Mountain, across all recorded sales (not restricted to the county’s "Qualified" tag — see §2.3).

2.2 Why These Two Comparable Communities

Warm Springs and Indian Mountain were selected as comparables because, like Redhill Forest, they are unincorporated Park County subdivisions of similar era, similar land-cost tier, and similar rural mountain-recreation character — not resort-market communities like those in Summit or Eagle County.

2.3 A Data-Quality Finding: Redefining "Qualified"

An early version of this analysis relied on the county’s own "Qualified Sale" flag to isolate arm’s-length market transactions. A spot-check against a known recent Redhill purchase (a 2020 vacant-lot sale between unrelated parties, followed by new construction) found that transaction — and every other sale on that parcel — marked "Unqualified" by the county, despite being an ordinary market sale. I raised this directly with the Park County Assessor’s office (Andrew Hopkins) for clarification.

His response resolved the question directly: "Qualified" and "Unqualified" do not mean "market" and "non-market." Every sale is reviewed using MLS records, deeds, and, where needed, direct contact with the buyer, seller, or Realtor — but a sale is only marked Qualified if it is representative enough of the typical market to be used in the county’s mass-appraisal model, which is itself audited annually by the State against qualified-sale prices. A sale can be a perfectly legitimate arm’s-length transaction and still be excluded because its specific circumstances make it unrepresentative for that modeling purpose.

He confirmed the specific reasons the spot-checked parcel’s sales were marked Unqualified: the 2016 sale was excluded because the "vacant" lot already had a septic system and driveway installed, making it unrepresentative of the typical unimproved-lot market; the 2020 sale was excluded because new construction followed the purchase, so the price could no longer be compared to the property’s vacant-land characteristics as of the valuation date. Other common disqualifying circumstances include related-party transfers, partial-interest sales, and multi-parcel sales.

This confirms the direction of the original correction (excluding sales that don’t reflect a parcel’s condition at time of sale) while clarifying that the county’s flag is doing something more specific than a simple arm’s-length test. I rebuilt the analysis using a definition of a genuine market sale: a standard conveyance instrument (Warranty Deed or Special Warranty Deed, in any tenancy form) carrying a real sale price (at least $1,000, to exclude nominal "and other valuable consideration" transfers common in family and related-party transfers). Deed types strongly associated with non-market transfers — Power of Attorney, Court Decree, Personal Representative’s, Quit Claim, Beneficiary Deed, and similar — were excluded regardless of price.

A related, unrelated-cause data-cleaning step: the raw export from the county’s sales-search tool contained duplicate rows for sales with multiple owners of record (e.g., a deed naming four family members produced repeated identical rows). All duplicate rows were removed before analysis; the sample counts throughout this report reflect deduplicated, verified-market-sale records.

2.4 A Special Note on Warm Springs

Many Redhill owners think of Warm Springs as the natural comparison community, and it is a reasonable comparison for home values. But it is not a usable comparison for vacant land, for a simple reason: Warm Springs is already overwhelmingly built out, with very few vacant-land sales in most years — too few to generate a reliable median price trend. This isn’t a flaw in the data; it reflects a real difference in the two communities’ development stage. Indian Mountain, which has a substantial vacant-land market in every year of this analysis, is the more appropriate comparison for the vacant-land analysis in Section 1.1.

2.5 Analytical Methods Used

• Cross-sectional annual median (§1.1, §1.2): each year’s median sale price (or price per acre) is compared across communities and over time. Simple and transparent, but sensitive to which specific properties sold in a thin year.

• Matched lot-size band (§1.1): the vacant-land comparison was re-run restricted to 1.5–4 acre lots — Redhill’s core lot-size range — to confirm the result wasn’t an artifact of Indian Mountain’s occasional larger parcels.

• Repeat sales (§1.3): every parcel that sold more than once was matched to itself, and the annualized price change between consecutive sales was calculated. This is the same logic behind widely used home-price indices (e.g., Case-Shiller), and is the most robust method used here because it removes property-mix effects.

• Post-construction verification (§1.2): "home" sales were checked against each parcel’s recorded Year Built and excluded if the sale predated construction (i.e., was actually a vacant-land sale under a since-updated parcel record).

• Outlier check: annual samples were inspected sale-by-sale (not just at the median) to confirm that year-over-year jumps reflected a broad shift across many parcels, not one or two extreme sales.

2.6 Limitations

• The vacant-land data cannot distinguish raw, unimproved lots from "vacant" lots that already carry site work such as a septic system or driveway (the Assessor’s office flagged this exact issue on sales spot-check). If Redhill’s vacant lots more often already have infrastructure in place — plausibly connected to the community’s water-system investment — that could be a real part of the value story rather than a distortion of it, but we have no field in this dataset to test that directly.

• Sample sizes for Redhill Forest home sales remain thin in several years (single digits), which is why the repeat-sales method, not the simple annual median, is the more reliable read on home appreciation.

• 2025–2026 data is a partial year and was excluded from the headline 2012–2024 comparison for consistency; directionally, 2025 data continues to show Redhill vacant land ahead of Indian Mountain.

• An early attempt to split the data at the 2012 water-system investment (“before vs. after”) was set aside: sale pairs starting before 2013 often began during the 2008–2009 financial-crisis price trough, which inflates apparent appreciation for that period across all three communities. That comparison was not clean enough to include.

• This analysis measures what happened to prices. It does not attempt to isolate how much of Redhill’s outperformance is attributable to any specific HOA investment (water system, road maintenance) versus general market conditions specific to Redhill’s location or reputation.

About the author: Don Cohen was the founder and executive director of The Economic Council of Eagle County for ten years. ECEC was a 501c3 funded by county and local municipalities and major employers in Eagle County. It provided quarterly economic reports and project analysis on workforce housing, public transportation and public safety. Much of it's work today is continued by the Vail Valley Partnership.