Gunbarrel Ridge and Teller Grove: home prices, who is buying, and how estate properties on the plains really sell

Updated September 2026 · Based on 13 recorded sales Jan 2021 – Sep 2026, 10 verified asking prices and 13 classified buyers

Photo: Jonathan Caliguire on Unsplash (Unsplash License)

East of Gunbarrel's subdivisions, where 75th and 79th Streets cross Lookout and Niwot Roads, the plains open into a checkerboard of county open space, working farms and a few dozen estate homes on two to five acres with the whole Front Range as the view. Gunbarrel Ridge and Teller Grove are the sub-market's two named subdivisions. It is a very small market — 13 sales since 2021 — of 5,000 sq ft houses with a $2.30M median, and a negotiable one: sellers list at market value, seven in ten sales close under asking, and the median sale is 5% under value.

The neighborhood

Assessor area 820 is the unincorporated farmland between Gunbarrel and the Boulder–Weld county line: roughly 75th Street east to 95th, Lookout Road and the Gunbarrel Ridge Road loop south to the Teller Farm and Teller Lakes open space along Valmont Road. Gunbarrel itself is a census-designated place of about 9,500 people that grew up from the 1960s around the IBM plant and is governed by Boulder County through a public improvement district formed in 1993; the acreage east of it was never subdivided into streets, only into rural parcels of two acres and up. Teller Farm — the city's open-space farm with its numbered lakes, crop fields, cattle and horse pasture and beekeeping, threaded by a 2.3-mile trail popular with runners, cyclists and birdwatchers — forms the south edge and guarantees the view will stay open.

The housing is estate-scale: the typical home sold since 2021 has five bedrooms and about 4,900 sq ft on 2.5 acres, built around 1995, with barns, outbuildings and horse facilities common. Gunbarrel Ridge, platted in the mid-1980s on five-acre-plus lots with a nominal homeowners association, and Teller Grove are the two named enclaves; the rest are individual farmsteads, a few of them pre-1950 farmhouses (8% of sales) that have been rebuilt or expanded, and a handful of new custom homes (15% built since 2000). The 2021–26 sales run from $1.48M to $7.5M.

Residents live in unincorporated Boulder County — the sheriff, county roads, no city services — and most properties are on wells and septic systems, with irrigation ditch shares and water rights part of what is bought and sold. Boulder County's flood mapping matters on this flat ground near the ditches and Boulder Creek, and the county's agricultural zoning limits further subdivision, which is why so little comes to market: one to three sales in a typical year. Schools are Heatherwood Elementary and Boulder Valley's Platt Middle and Fairview or Boulder High by assignment, with Niwot's schools in the St. Vrain district just north. The Diagonal Highway puts downtown Boulder about 20 minutes away and Longmont 15.

Where Gunbarrel East plains – Gunbarrel Ridge / Teller Grove (unincorp.) is

Map centered on the 13 geocoded sales in assessor neighborhood 820; the neighborhood boundary is the Boulder County Assessor's appraisal area, not a formal city boundary.

Homes and prices in Gunbarrel East plains – Gunbarrel Ridge / Teller Grove (unincorp.)

All 13 sales since 2021 were detached houses on acreage, and because the sample is so small the figures use the full 2021–26 window. The $2.30M median is two and a half times Boulder's city-wide median, but at $518 per square foot the sub-market is 6% cheaper than Boulder per foot — the money buys size (a 4,900 sq ft median house) and land rather than a Boulder street address. The middle half of sales fell in a narrow band between $2.20M and $2.60M, with one sale near $1.5M and one at $7.5M as outliers. The 2026 median jumps to $4.5M on two sales; on one to three sales a year, every annual figure here is a specific house, not a trend.

The typical home sold in 2021–26 has 5 bedrooms, 3 baths and 4,926 sq ft, on a 109,419 sq ft lot; the median build year is 1995, with 7.7% of homes built before 1950 and 15.4% since 2000. Prices run from $1.48M to $7.50M.

Median sale price by year

Single-family houses   Condos & townhomes   (labels: sales per year, houses / condos)

Medians move with the mix of what sold each year (a run of large rebuilds lifts the house number); a bar is omitted when fewer than three of that type sold. Read the trend, not single-year steps.

What it takes to buy here

At the 2021–26 median of $2,300,000, a conventional purchase with 20% down at a 6.76% 30-year rate costs about $13,671 a month including taxes and insurance, which lenders would typically want to see backed by a household income near $585,919 and roughly $506,000 in cash at closing. 89.7% of all Boulder sales in 2025–26 closed below this neighborhood's median.

Who is buying in Gunbarrel East plains – Gunbarrel Ridge / Teller Grove (unincorp.)

Thirteen classified buyers on 11 transactions cannot support firm percentages, so read the pattern rather than the numbers. Professional services is the largest sector at 15% (Boulder 9%), driven by accounting and consulting employers; media and entertainment employers account for 23% of buyers against 3% city-wide, and energy and utilities 15% against 2% — three buyers each, but a striking contrast with Boulder's usual tech-and-university mix. Tech, health care and university buyers each run at about 8%, roughly half their city shares, and the nonprofit sector is 8% against 4%. There are no recorded finance, legal, aerospace, real-estate or government buyers. Only one purchase in 13 was cash, well below Boulder's 21%, which is unusual for a $2.3M market and points to financed buyers trading up for land.

Share of 13 classified buyers on 8 transactions with an identified employer; industry attribution only, no individual buyer identified.

How Gunbarrel East plains – Gunbarrel Ridge / Teller Grove (unincorp.) prices — and how to play it

E   Ownify competitiveness index 14 / 100 — the lowest grade Ownify assigns, which in Boulder means negotiable: homes with these characteristics are expected to close below asking and below market value more often than almost anywhere else in the county. On 10 verified asking prices the record agrees — sellers list at value (99.4%), the median sale is 97.5% of asking and 94.6% of value, and only one sale in ten closed over ask — but a grade built on 13 sales is a direction, not a verdict.

If you are selling

The Gunbarrel Ridge and Teller Grove convention is to list at market value — 99.4% of it — and accept roughly 2.5% under asking after about seven weeks, which leaves the median sale about 5% below value. Ownify's Boulder model puts the probability of selling in the listing at 91% for an ask at the convention, 91% at value, 88% at 108% and 87% at 112%. The odds barely move with the ask, but the days do: Boulder listings at or under 105% of value take a median 38 days, 42 at 105–110% and 49–55 above 110%, and this sub-market already runs a 47-day median with 30% of listings passing 60 days. Only 10% of sales here have closed over asking, and because roughly 93% of the asking price passes through to the sale price in Boulder, an over-ask on an estate property mostly buys weeks and is then negotiated back. Price at value, not above it, and put the land in the listing packet — well yield, septic, water and ditch rights, outbuilding permits, the flood-zone determination and an insurance quote — because acreage buyers negotiate on exactly those items.

With ten verified asking prices behind these percentages, the convention is a starting point; the comparables for a specific property matter more.

If you are buying

Buyers have leverage. Seven in ten sales close under asking, the median sale is 2.5% below ask and about 5% below market value, and 30% of listings are still available after 60 days. A bid 3–5% under asking on a property that has been listed six weeks is within the historical pattern, and cash is almost never the competition — one purchase in 13. What wins is being ready on the land: a lender and an insurer will both want a well test, septic inspection, the flood determination and clarity on water and ditch rights before closing, and the buyer who has those in hand can move when a seller tires of waiting. Every sale here since 2021 has been above the Ownify Home Fund's $1M ceiling, so purchases are financed through an Ownify mortgage rather than the 2%-down program; the least expensive sale was about $1.5M and there are no condos or townhomes.

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