The clock appears to be ticking on opportunities to build a new home within the Fort Collins city limits.

Based on the current rate of housing growth, measured against the existing amount of development land in the city, Fort Collins could exhaust its supply of housing lots within 17 years. That’s the timeline calculated by Fort Collins city planners in a “Community Buildout Analysis” recently provided to the City Council.

For would-be homebuyers and investors, the news should be a call to action: If you want to build a new single-family home in Fort Collins, you’ll need to get cracking.

According to the city’s report, the latest population estimate for Fort Collins is 155,400 – and 169,000 for the larger Fort Collins Growth Management Area (GMA). Officials believe the GMA is large enough to accommodate up to 255,000 people. Consequently, with a population growth rate of 2.371 percent (the average annual growth rate over the past 20 years), Fort Collins could run out of residential development ground by 2032.

Such a real estate scenario could generate the following ramifications:

  • First, expect more competition for fewer available homes, which means rising prices.
  • Second, investors will have greater incentive to redevelop existing home sites with denser and taller housing, such as condominiums.
  • Third, a larger share of the Fort Collins workforce will be compelled to live outside the city to find more affordable housing, resulting greater traffic volumes.

In each case, the impact of a dwindling land supply brings to mind the housing experience in the city of Boulder, where housing prices have been forcing Boulder workers to live in neighboring towns for the past three decades. Today, approximately 67 percent of Boulder workers commute from outside the city – compared to 45 percent of Fort Collins workers.