u/Young_Denver

Most of the conversation about housing costs in Denver focuses on what you can't control (rates, prices, inventory). But something pretty significant changed on June 30, 2025 that most homeowners missed.

HB 24-1152 now requires every city in the Denver Metro to allow one ADU on any single-family lot as a permitted use by right. No public hearings, no rezoning, just administrative approval. HOAs can no longer ban them outright either.

The practical effect: if you own a home in Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Englewood — almost anywhere in the metro — you can now legally build a rental unit on your property that wasn't possible 18 months ago.

At current Denver rents ($1,200–$1,800/month for a 1-bed), that's a 30–60% reduction in your effective mortgage payment.

Curious if anyone here has actually pulled permits under the new rules yet. Hearing timelines are all over the place depending on the city.

With multiple apartment complexes still offering one to three months of free rent on new leases, concessions hit a record of $180 in savings per month in the first quarter. That’s equivalent to skipping rent for four to five weeks a year and effectively paying about $1,580 a month. Average rents also dropped 3.4% from a year ago to $1,758, and were barely up $4 since December.

And then there was this:

“Our current average of $1,758, this is the same exact dollar-for-dollar rent that we had in” first quarter 2022, said Scott Rathbun, with Apartment Insights and author of the quarterly report. “So basically, rents today are at the same level they were … four years ago.”

The plunge is credited to the rental market trying to absorb tens of thousands of new apartments that have been built in the past five years. That’s pushed prices for some studios and one-bedrooms below 60%, 70% and 80% of area median incomes that some affordable-housing ordinances require. The average rent for a one-bedroom was $1,551, before concessions, according to AAMD data.

Today’s $1,758 price comes after more than 70,000 new apartments were built in five years, flooding the rental market with modern amenities and brand new spaces. That increased the number of apartment rentals by 18% to 452,591 apartments today.

Normally, the Denver market absorbs 10,000 new rentals a year. But in 2024, nearly 20,000 new apartments came online. Another 15,330 came online last year. Landlords began offering incentives and discounts to attract new tenants. That pushed Denver’s concessions to be the highest in the nation, according to Zillow.

At the end of last year, Denver ranked third in the nation for the largest decline in effective rents, falling 7.3%.

And there are another 46,000 apartment units proposed or under construction in metro Denver. But about 20,000 of the proposed units are in limbo because they “just haven’t been economically feasible to move forward and break ground for four years,” Rathbun said.

Cornerstone Apartment Services, which manages about 8,000 units mostly in downtown Denver, also shared its figures. Average rents are down 4.2% from a year ago to $1,384, said Jim Lorenzen, the company’s president.

What’s more telling though, he said, is how much a new tenant is paying compared with the person who just moved out. That’s down 6.6% to $1,268. Comparably, AAMD’s average asking rent for Denver County was down 2.9% in the past year.

Colorado's ADU law quietly changed everything for Denver homeowners last year — most people still don't know

Denver show - Anyone have 1-2 extra tix?