NoBo – Uptown Broadway / Holiday, Boulder: home prices, who is buying, and how homes really sell here

Updated September 2026 · Based on 357 recorded sales Jan 2021 – Sep 2026, 150 verified asking prices and 314 classified buyers

Photo: Matthew Williams on Unsplash (Unsplash License)

NoBo is the newest neighborhood in Boulder and the only one built on purpose: the Holiday neighborhood on the old drive-in site, the mixed-use blocks of Uptown Broadway, and the warehouses of the NoBo Art District along upper Broadway between Iris Avenue and U.S. 36. More than half the homes sold here since 2021 were built after 2000. The 2025–26 median is $1.08M, 13% above Boulder, split between $635K rowhouses and condos and $1.94M houses, and homes sell at 99.6% of asking in six weeks.

The neighborhood

The sub-market — county appraisal neighborhood 122 — runs along Broadway from Iris Avenue north to the U.S. 36 turn at Lee Hill Road, with Wonderland Hill and the foothills to the west and the Palo Park blocks to the east. Until the 1990s this was the unglamorous end of town: the Holiday Drive-In, which moved out here from 28th and Colorado in 1969, an Army National Guard armory, warehouses, and a scatter of ranch houses on unpaved streets. The city bought the 27-acre drive-in site in 1997, and between then and 2008 Boulder Housing Partners and five private builders turned it into the Holiday neighborhood: 334 homes on a walkable modified grid, 40% of them permanently affordable, with a two-acre central park, community gardens, an orchard, the Wild Sage cohousing community and about 58,000 square feet of shops and restaurants along Broadway.

The housing is unusually varied for Boulder because it was designed to be. Holiday mixes 580-square-foot studios and live-work units, lofts over retail, rowhouses, duplexes and triplexes, cottages and a few detached houses up to 2,700 square feet; Uptown Broadway to the south added three- and four-story mixed-use condo buildings; the former armory has become an apartment complex; and the west edge toward Wonderland Hill and the north end near Lee Hill carry large newer houses on 9,000-square-foot lots that pull the house median to $1.94M. Roughly half of sales are houses and half condos and rowhouses; the median sale is a three-bedroom, two-bath home of 1,960 square feet built in 2003.

The neighborhood's amenities are still arriving. The North Boulder library branch opened in 2024, Violet Park and the North Sky Trail are new, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art plans to anchor a cultural campus here, and First Friday art walks fill the NoBo Art District studios. The SKIP bus runs Broadway every ten to fifteen minutes, Foothills Community Park and the Wonderland Lake and Hogback trailheads are within a mile, and the schools are Crest View Elementary, Centennial Middle and Boulder High. Turnover is 43–80 sales a year.

Where NoBo – Uptown Broadway / Holiday is

Map centered on the 345 geocoded sales in assessor neighborhood 122; the neighborhood boundary is the Boulder County Assessor's appraisal area, not a formal city boundary.

Homes and prices in NoBo – Uptown Broadway / Holiday

Sales split almost evenly between houses (52%) and condos and rowhouses (48%), and the two halves are different markets: a 2025–26 median of $1.94M for houses against $635K for attached homes. The blended $1.08M median is 13% above Boulder's, but at $546 per square foot NoBo is priced at the city average — a new-build neighborhood selling at a per-foot price set by 1970s ranches elsewhere, which reflects both the affordable-deed-restricted share of the stock and the fact that buyers here are paying for a house, not for land. The middle half of sales fell between $650K and $2.08M; 47% of sales close under the Ownify Home Fund's $1M ceiling (2% down), essentially the rowhouses and condos; the houses above it are financed through an Ownify mortgage rather than the 2%-down program.

The typical home sold in 2025–26 has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1,960 sq ft, on a 9,383 sq ft lot; the median build year is 2003, with 1.1% of homes built before 1950 and 57.4% since 2000. Prices run from $140K to $7.72M.

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 2025–26 median of $1,075,000, a conventional purchase with 20% down at a 6.76% 30-year rate costs about $6,390 a month including taxes and insurance, which lenders would typically want to see backed by a household income near $273,853 and roughly $236,500 in cash at closing. 56.9% of all Boulder sales in 2025–26 closed below this neighborhood's median.

Who is buying in NoBo – Uptown Broadway / Holiday

NoBo's buyers are the least institutional in Boulder. Self-employed and small-business owners are the top group at 9% (Boulder 6%), professional services 11% (9%), and finance 8% against 6% — the artists, restaurateurs and consultants the neighborhood was designed for, with government administration buyers at nearly double the city share. The three sectors that dominate Boulder overall are all under-represented here: tech at 12% (16%), the university and research labs at 9% (12%) and health care at 10% (12%). Food-and-beverage, internet and marketing buyers are over-indexed. Cash is 17% of purchases, below Boulder's 21% — a neighborhood of financed owner-occupiers rather than investors.

Share of 314 classified buyers on 234 transactions with an identified employer; industry attribution only, no individual buyer identified.

How NoBo – Uptown Broadway / Holiday prices — and how to play it

C   Ownify competitiveness index 45 / 100 — a C, which in Boulder means typical: homes with these characteristics in this sub-market are expected to close close to asking and close to market value, with neither the premium of Gunbarrel nor the discount of the older west-side neighborhoods. New construction and a wide product range make the index an average of two quite different markets.

If you are selling

The NoBo convention is to list about 1.8% above market value and accept less than half a percent under asking after six weeks. Ownify's Boulder model puts the probability of selling in the listing at 88% for an ask at the convention (101.8% of value), 85% at 108%, and 83% at 112% — the curve is flat, so a bolder ask costs a few points of odds but mostly costs days: listings at or below 105% of value take a median 38 days in Boulder, 49 days at 110–120%. Only 19% of sales here close over asking, 52% under, and the median sale is 99.6% of list, so this is not a market to under-price for a bidding war. With 93% of the asking price passing through to the sale, price at the convention and hold it.

The two halves need different comparables. A Holiday rowhouse or an Uptown Broadway condo prices off the same building or block within the last four quarters — and whether it carries a permanent-affordability deed restriction is the first fact to establish, because those homes sell at a formula price outside the market. A detached house here competes with Wonderland Hill and Newlands for the same buyer, and the house median has moved between $1.19M and $2.31M since 2021 on small counts and changing mix. Budget for six weeks; 30% of listings take more than two months.

If you are buying

Buyers have a little room, not a lot. Half of sales close under asking, the median discount is under half a percent, and 30% of listings are still available after 60 days — those are where a bid 2–3% under asking wins in Ownify's Boulder bidding model; on a fresh listing, at ask is the competitive position. Cash is a smaller factor here (17%) than in Boulder overall, so a financed buyer with a solid pre-approval is on level ground. The attached homes are the value: a rowhouse or condo at the $635K median is inside the Ownify Home Fund's $1M ceiling — about $12,700 down with Ownify's 2% versus roughly $140,000 for a conventional 20% down plus closing costs — and is one of the few ways to own a post-2000 home in Boulder within walking distance of a library, a park and a dozen restaurants. Ask whether a unit is deed-restricted before comparing prices.

Frequently asked questions