The real surprise was lower down the market

With the worst snow conditions in memory working against it, you could have forgiven the rest of the market for stalling too. It did the opposite where it counts most. Outside the very high end, more homes closed this April than a year ago, up 27%, and through the first four months of the year closings are running 8.5% ahead of the same stretch in 2025. That held with far fewer winter resort-oriented buyers in the mix, fewer people here primarily for the ski season. The same winter that kept the luxury tier on the sidelines reshaped who was buying everywhere else. That those buyers turned out at all, in a season like this one, is the remarkable part.

A mixed story, not a value story

Start with the headline number, an overall average price down 35% in April. On its own it looks alarming. Read correctly, it is a story about mix, not value. Almost every sale that closed was in the lower and middle of the market, with the high end largely absent. The share of $5M+ deals fell from roughly 22% of all April sales to about 6%. Strip that many big-ticket transactions out of the blend and the average falls on its own, even as prices within each segment hold.

The median is the number that should stop you. Across the full year to date, the price of the typical home that changed hands barely moved, $1.60M to $1.59M, less than 1% apart. When the mix shifts this hard toward lower-priced homes and the median still holds, it tells you values did not soften. And the broad market stayed busy doing it: closed sales are running 8.5% ahead of last year, pending sales 11.6% ahead. Volume up, values flat, in the worst winter on record.

The one real soft spot was the very top, and that traces to the winter, not the economy. The $5M-and-up buyer tends to own three or four homes and has somewhere else to be when a season turns out the way this one did. So when the snow did not come, that buyer largely did not either. Take the weather effect off the top tier and the year to date reads as a healthy market, running slightly ahead of last year. The fundamentals were there. The snow was not. This is where knowing your micromarket is everything.

The top of the market: slow, but not soft

Let me be straight about what closed at the top of the market in April: it was extremely slow. Closings above $5M fell from 14 to 5, down 64% for the month and 35% across the year to date, and there is no dressing that up. But where there were luxury buyers, the numbers were strong. The average $5M+ sale climbed 30% to $12.53M, the median rose to $7.00M, and buyers paid nearly 95% of asking. So the slowness was about how few buyers were here, not about what they were willing to pay. The handful that did close in April landed at the top of the range.

The ultra-wealthy came at the holidays. Most never came back.

Here is what most of us saw firsthand. A good number of our luxury buyers came through over the holidays, from December into early January, and most left planning to return later in the season. The vast majority never did. The conditions simply did not give them a reason to.

And snowmaking, even some of the best in the business, can only do so much. It can cover a trail. It cannot quiet a social feed that turns every bare hillside into a headline, because the unusual is what earns the clicks. This winter, the story of the conditions traveled faster and farther than the conditions themselves, and for a second-home owner deciding whether to fly back, that noise did its own quiet work.

And it was not that the skiing was bad. For the average skier, the runs were good and fun. It simply did not feel like winter. One of my own clients put it best. They ski groomers mostly, not the trees or the back bowls, and they told me that on plenty of days this winter the mountain was genuinely good and they had a great time. What was missing, they said, was not really on the hill. It was the view.

Honestly, those days were perfect. We just needed the horizon snow-plated.— A longtime Vail client

That is the honest truth of it. It is not the same to stand in Vail in the heart of the season and look across at brown, bare slopes, even with snow up high and great snowmaking under your skis. The mountain delivered as well as was possible. The view did not, and the feeling of winter is most of what brings people back.

You could feel the absence in small ways. The days themselves were lovely. You could ski the groomers for a few hours, take a long lunch on a sunny patio, and shop in the afternoon. And the restaurants that normally take a reservation weeks out had tables. Still busy, still vibrant, just not impossible to get into. That is as clear a sign as any that fewer of the people who fill this valley in a normal season were actually here.

The wealth was busy everywhere else

If you want the cleanest proof that this was about snow and not money, look at the luxury markets that had no winter to blame. Across the major sun-belt and coastal markets that feed the same buyer pool, the $5M-and-up tier held firm to record through 2025 and into 2026.

South Florida is the closest comparison to our buyers, and the strongest evidence. The region posted its highest tally of $10M-plus home sales since 2021, and on Palm Beach Island first-quarter sales rose 36% year over year with the average price up 18% to $19.6M. The Hamptons set an all-time high for $5M-and-up sales, a record 17% of fourth-quarter deals, with early 2026 settling into fewer trades at higher prices, the same less-competition, prices-holding pattern we are seeing here. In Manhattan, luxury sales surged on the back of record Wall Street bonuses near $49B.

Even the markets where the broader numbers cooled tell the same story at the top. In Paradise Valley and Scottsdale, homes under $5M were softening while the top set records, including a $32.4M sale and multiple all-cash deals above $20M. In Beverly Hills, the $10M-plus trophy tier is transaction-light but value-stable, with 85 to 90% of those deals closing in cash, detached from mortgage rates entirely. Fewer trades, prices holding. That is the luxury tier behaving exactly as it did here, minus the snow.

The wealth did not go anywhere. In Vail, it simply had a reason to be somewhere else.

History is emphatic

Now the good news, and please do not fret. Vail is fortunate. We do not get many terrible snow years, and history is emphatic about what follows the bad ones. The last time we had a winter this poor, 1976-77, the very next season Vail Mountain recorded 504 inches of snow, a single-season record that held until 2010-11. A historic drought rolled directly into a historic winter.

And the pattern itself has already turned. The conditions behind this year's drought have faded, and forecasters now favor a developing El Niño, likely strong and possibly a super one, taking hold through the coming winter. No one can promise a single season a year out, and predicting mountain weather is humbling work. But El Niño has historically tilted Colorado wetter. Look at the last four major El Niño winters in Colorado: three delivered above-average snowpack, including 131 percent of average in 2023-24, and the fourth came in at 93 percent, squarely inside the 90 to 110 percent band that counts as a normal year. Not one was a bad winter. After the season we just had, that history is worth sitting with.

And the buyers are about to come back

Here is the other side of a winter like this. The luxury buyer in this valley typically owns three, four, or more homes, held for investment and for the life they want to live. A great many of them skipped their mountain time entirely this year, and people who skip the thing they love tend to come back to it with more appetite, not less. After a winter away, the mountains have a way of pulling people home.

And summer is arriving early and beautifully. The thaw came weeks ahead of schedule, the valley is greener and more striking than usual for the date, and May has looked far more like June. For buyers who sat out the winter, that is an open invitation. For sellers, it is the return of foot traffic. Either way, the people who were missing from the mountains this winter are the ones most likely to be standing in them this summer.

Summer brings its own pull. As the heat climbs across the feeder markets that send so many buyers here, from Texas and Florida to the Southeast, the Vail Valley becomes the easy place to be, the wealthy’s favorite corner of the Rockies. Many of those visitors have built real wealth that could stand some diversification, and a few weeks in the mountains has a way of turning into a conversation about owning here. Some will find the home they have has grown too large for their needs, or not large enough for a growing family, and they will make a move. None of it is guaranteed, but the ingredients for a vibrant summer are in place.

The window

That is the entire point. A bad snow year is not a trend, particularly in the Rockies, and it is certainly not a reason to step back from one of the most resilient luxury markets in the country. Look at the major markets that were not sitting under an unusual winter. They have been extremely active. The crowd here is still watching weather reports. The smart money is watching history, and the savviest luxury buyers are already poking around, with several planning to come in early next season, ahead of the crowd. To be clear, this is not about prices falling across the board, because they have not. It is that a quieter winter leaves more opportunity on the table than a normal year does: more selection, less competition, and in certain pockets, sellers who are genuinely motivated. There are even a few standout new-construction opportunities in the high-end sector right now, and some are sweetening the deal with something that is normally impossible to get at any price: memberships into private clubs whose waitlists have been closed for years, in one case for two decades. You simply have to know where to look.

There is one more thing working in buyers' favor. There are some genuinely remarkable tax incentives for real estate investment available right now, and they reach all the way into the most expensive tier of the market. I walk through exactly how they work, including on a new construction purchase, in a separate briefing. In my honest opinion, they are too good to last. If that interests you, talk to me. I can give you some initial insight and point you toward the right tax advisor, or at least hand you the topics worth raising with the one you already have. Combine those benefits with the right opportunity in today's quieter market, and a couple of years from now you may find yourself quietly pleased with a decision most people were too distracted to make.