Who Owns Redhill Forest?

Ownership & Property Composition Analysis, 2026

Data source: Park County, CO Assessor records

This analysis profiles the full current roster of 570 Redhill Forest parcels (all five filings) using Park County Assessor property records, to answer a simple question the Board has not previously had hard data on: who actually owns Redhill Forest, and how do they hold their property?

• Vacant land remains the majority of Redhill Forest parcels: 380 vacant lots (67%) versus 186 homes (33%), plus 4 exempt parcels (HOA/water association infrastructure).

• Ownership is geographically dispersed, and not in the pattern often assumed. Denver Metro owners hold the largest share (45%), but out-of-state owners (29%) are nearly five times larger a group than Colorado Springs-area owners (6%) — the opposite of the "Denver, then Colorado Springs, then a small out-of-state group" assumption sometimes voiced by owners.

• By a mailing-address proxy, most Redhill homes are likely second homes, not primary residences: only 20% of the 186 built homes have a Park County mailing address on file.

• This is the same pattern reflected in the community’s history as a camping/recreation destination that has slowly densified with construction — most owners, including most homeowners, appear to hold Redhill as a second property rather than a primary residence.

Findings

1.1 Property Mix

Of the 570 total parcels across Redhill Forest’s five filings, 380 (67%) are vacant land, 186 (33%) are improved with a home, and 4 are exempt parcels (the water association and similar community infrastructure). This confirms that most Redhill owners hold undeveloped land, not a residence — a fact worth keeping in mind when communicating with the ownership base, since messaging aimed at "homeowners" misses two-thirds of the membership.

1.2 Geographic Distribution of Ownership

Owner mailing addresses were classified into six regions: Denver Metro, Colorado Springs Metro, other Colorado, local Park County towns, out-of-state, and international.

Figure 1. Geographic distribution of Redhill Forest ownership, by owner mailing address (all 570 parcels).

Region	Parcels	% of Total
Denver Metro	257	45.1%
Out of State	166	29.1%
Other Colorado	66	11.6%
Local (Park County)	45	7.9%
Colorado Springs Metro	34	6.0%
International	2	0.4%

Table 1. Ownership by region.

The out-of-state group is led by Texas (44 parcels, effectively tied with local Park County ownership), followed by Florida (19) and Kansas (14). This is a meaningfully larger and more geographically spread out-of-state contingent than the "small wedge of Texas and Midwest owners" impression sometimes assumed — out-of-state ownership is the second-largest ownership group overall, well ahead of Colorado Springs.

1.3 Full-Time vs. Second-Home Proxy

Using owner mailing address as a proxy — a home whose tax bill goes to a Park County address (Fairplay, Alma, Como, Hartsel, Guffey, or Lake George) is presumed more likely to be a primary residence — the data suggests most Redhill homes are second homes, not primary residences.

Figure 2. Mailing-address proxy for Redhill Forest’s 186 built homes.

elsewhere. This proxy is imperfect (see §2.2), but the scale of the gap is large enough that the qualitative conclusion — Redhill is predominantly a second-home and vacant-land community, even among those who have built — is likely directionally correct.

The pattern is even starker for vacant land: local owners who do own at Redhill have overwhelmingly already built (37 homes vs. only 8 vacant lots among local owners), while every other region skews heavily toward holding undeveloped land.

1.4 County Appraised Value Distribution (Homes)

Splitting Redhill’s 186 homes by the county’s appraised value (its estimate of full property value, not the separate "assessed value" used to calculate tax bills — see §2.4) shows a fairly even spread across four value tiers:

Figure 3. County appraised value distribution, Redhill Forest homes.

Appraised Value Cohort	Homes	% of Homes
Under $400,000	28	15%
$400,000 – $550,000	64	34%
$550,000 – $700,000	68	37%
$700,000 and above	26	14%

Table 2. County appraised value cohorts, homes only (n=186).

This is the county’s appraised value, not a market sale price — it is the Assessor’s own estimate of full property value, distinct from the discounted "assessed value" figure used to calculate tax bills (see §2.4 for that distinction). It is broadly in line with the market sale prices found in the companion Property Value Analysis report (2024 median home sale price of roughly $520,000), which is a reassuring cross-check, though appraised value and actual sale price will differ for any individual property.

Methodology

2.1 Data Source

Data comes from the Park County Assessor’s "Search by Subdivision" tool (qpublic.schneidercorp.com), pulled separately for each of Redhill Forest’s five filings and combined into a single roster of 570 unique parcels — the complete current parcel inventory, not just parcels with a recorded sale history. Each record includes parcel ID, acreage, account type (vacant/residential/exempt), full owner mailing address, and the county’s current property valuation (land, building, and total, in two forms — see §2.4).

This parcel count (570) independently matches the unique-parcel count derived from the transaction-history pull used in the companion Property Value Analysis report, which is a useful cross-check that both datasets are capturing the same underlying parcel universe.

2.2 Full-Time / Second-Home Proxy: Method and Limitations

Owner mailing address was parsed from the last non-empty address line on file, extracting city, state, and ZIP. A home was flagged as "likely full-time" if its mailing address is in Fairplay or a nearby Park County town, on the reasoning that owners living elsewhere would have their tax bill routed to that other address.

This proxy is a reasonable starting signal, not a certainty. It will misclassify: owners who live at Redhill full-time but route mail to a P.O. box or agent elsewhere; recent movers whose mailing address hasn’t been updated with the county; and owners who split time roughly evenly between Redhill and elsewhere. The scale of the gap found here (80% of homes with non-local mailing addresses) is large enough that some meaningful full-time/second-home skew is very likely real, but the exact 80/20 split should be treated as directional, not precise.

2.3 Geographic Region Classification

Owner mailing cities were grouped into Denver Metro and Colorado Springs Metro using standard front-range suburb lists; Colorado cities outside those two metro areas and outside Park County were grouped as "Other Colorado"; non-Colorado addresses were grouped by state as "Out of State"; and the two records with no parseable U.S. state (both apparently international addresses) were flagged separately.

Address parsing succeeded for 568 of 570 records (99.6%); the 2 failures were the international addresses just noted and were excluded from the state-level breakdown accordingly.

2.4 A Note on "Appraised Value" vs. "Assessed Value"

The Assessor’s export includes two distinct value figures per parcel, and conflating them is a common source of confusion. "Total Value" is the county’s appraisal estimate of the property’s full value — a dollar figure comparable to a market price. "Total Assessed" is a much smaller number obtained by multiplying that appraised value by Colorado’s residential assessment rate (about 6.1% for Redhill’s homes in this data), and exists purely as the base for calculating property tax bills; it was never intended to represent, and should never be read as, the property’s actual value. An earlier version of this report used "Total Assessed" for the value-cohort analysis in §1.4, which produced correct but confusingly small figures (e.g., "$20,000–$35,000"); this version uses "Total Value" instead, which reads as an ordinary home-value figure.

2.5 Limitations

• The full-time/second-home and geographic-distribution figures are a snapshot of current ownership and mailing records; they will shift over time as properties change hands and do not reflect owners’ actual time spent on-site.

• Owner names were used only to identify and de-duplicate parcel records; this report presents aggregate counts and cohorts only, not owner-level detail, to protect individual privacy.

• The appraised-value cohorts (§1.4) are the county’s valuation estimate, not actual sale prices; see the companion Property Value Analysis report for market-price-based appreciation figures.

• Four exempt parcels (community/HOA infrastructure) were included in the overall parcel count but excluded from the homeowner- and value-specific analyses in §1.3 and §1.4.

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.