Old North Boulder, Boulder: home prices, who is buying, and how homes really sell here

Updated September 2026 · Based on 290 recorded sales Jan 2021 – Sep 2026, 127 verified asking prices and 263 classified buyers

Photo: Matthew Williams on Unsplash (Unsplash License)

Old North Boulder is the mid-century grid east of Broadway — the Green Meadows and Edgewood blocks of 1950s–60s ranches between Alpine and Iris, six blocks from Pearl Street, where the lots are flat, the streets are wide and the pop-top is the local architectural style. It is a brisk, evenly balanced market: a 2025–26 median of $1.19M, homes selling at 99.2% of asking in five weeks, three in ten over ask, and the strongest tech and finance buyer tilt of any Boulder sub-market.

The neighborhood

The sub-market is framed by Broadway on the west, Folsom Street on the east, Alpine Avenue and the Edgewood Drive diagonal on the south and Iris Avenue on the north. Before the post-war boom this was simply "North Boulder"; the "Old" was added once the city grew past Iris and the newer NoBo took the name. Green Meadows and Edgewood were platted as tract subdivisions in the 1950s and 60s, and the neighborhood is still almost entirely single-family houses of that era: 4.5% of homes sold here since 2021 were built before 1950 and 11% since 2000, with a median build year of 1966. The typical sale is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,700 sq ft ranch on a 7,600 sq ft lot.

What has changed is what sits on those lots. Old North Boulder is Boulder's pop-top and scrape capital: original brick ranches, ranches with a second storey added, and full rebuilds share every block, and the price range since 2021 — $161K for a small condo to $3.6M for a new build — is unusually wide for a mid-century neighborhood. Three micro-areas price differently. The blocks nearest Broadway and Alpine, a short walk to Ideal Market, Community Plaza and downtown, carry the premium; the Green Meadows core around Columbine Elementary and the North Boulder Recreation Center is the family heart; and the eastern blocks toward Folsom and the Goose Creek path, closer to the 28th Street commercial strip, are the relative value. Condos and townhomes are 18% of sales, in small complexes on the edges along Broadway, Folsom and Iris.

Convenience is the pitch. You are never more than about five blocks from a bus, the SKIP on Broadway runs every ten minutes, the Goose Creek path connects Edgewood to Valmont Bike Park and the east side, and Pearl Street is a ten-minute walk from the south end. Columbine Elementary was rebuilt in 2010; middle and high school are Casey and Boulder High. Turnover is 40–56 sales a year, most of them houses.

Where Old North Boulder – Green Meadows / Edgewood is

Map centered on the 289 geocoded sales in assessor neighborhood 115; the neighborhood boundary is the Boulder County Assessor's appraisal area, not a formal city boundary.

Homes and prices in Old North Boulder – Green Meadows / Edgewood

Four in five sales are houses, and the 2025–26 house median is $1.29M; the condo and townhome pockets on the edges have a $554K median that pulls the blended figure to $1.19M, 25% above Boulder's $948K. At $663 per square foot — 20% above the city's $552 — Old North Boulder is priced like the west side of Broadway rather than like the mid-century neighborhoods further east, and the reason is the lot: a flat 7,600 sq ft parcel six blocks from Pearl Street is worth building on, so the land floor under every original ranch is high. The yearly medians show the rebuild effect: house medians jumped to $1.73M in 2022 on a run of new-build sales, fell back to $1.20M in 2023–24, and have moved up again to $1.28–1.32M in 2025–26. Read the trend as flat-to-firm, with single years distorted by what happened to sell.

The typical home sold in 2025–26 has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1,700 sq ft, on a 7,647 sq ft lot; the median build year is 1966, with 4.5% of homes built before 1950 and 11.0% since 2000. Prices run from $161K to $3.60M.

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 $1,190,000, a conventional purchase with 20% down at a 6.76% 30-year rate costs about $7,073 a month including taxes and insurance, which lenders would typically want to see backed by a household income near $303,149 and roughly $261,800 in cash at closing. 63.1% of all Boulder sales in 2025–26 closed below this neighborhood's median.

Who is buying in Old North Boulder – Green Meadows / Edgewood

Old North Boulder has one of the most private-sector buyer pools in the city, and the highest combined tech and finance share of any sub-market. Tech is 22% of buyers against 16% city-wide — software and IT, computer hardware and internet employers are each over-represented by a quarter to a half — and finance and insurance is 9% against 6%, with financial-services employers over-indexed by more than half; venture and private-equity buyers are also above their Boulder share. University and research buyers, the largest group city-wide, are the notable absence at 8% against 12%, and health care is a little under the city at 11%. Construction and trades (3.4% vs 2.2%) and energy (3% vs 2%) round out the over-index, consistent with a neighborhood where a good share of buyers are also builders and renovators. Consulting, legal, small-business and government buyers are all slightly under-represented. 17% of purchases are cash, a little below Boulder's 20.5%.

Share of 263 classified buyers on 186 transactions with an identified employer; industry attribution only, no individual buyer identified.

How Old North Boulder – Green Meadows / Edgewood prices — and how to play it

C   Ownify competitiveness index 46 / 100 — a middle grade, which in Boulder means typical: homes here close about where they are listed, with a somewhat higher share going over asking than the city average and a somewhat higher share going under too. The wide gap between original and rebuilt homes means the average hides two different markets.

If you are selling

The Old North Boulder convention is to list about 2.6% above market value and accept roughly 0.8% under asking after five weeks. Ownify's Boulder model puts the probability of selling in the listing at 85% for an ask at the convention (102.6% of value), 83% at 108% and 81% at 112% — a few points lower across the board than in Table Mesa or Gunbarrel, because the rebuild mix makes value harder to pin down and mispriced listings more common. The curve is flat, so a bolder ask costs odds only slowly, but it costs time: listings above 110% of value take a median 49–55 days in Boulder against 38 at value. Because 93% of the asking price passes through to the sale price in Boulder, pricing at or slightly above value is the better trade than under-pricing to spark a contest; that said, 29% of sales here do go over asking, and those are almost always well-presented original or lightly updated ranches priced at value, where several buyers see a house they can afford to improve.

Comparables must be split by product. An original 1960s ranch, a pop-top and a new build on the same block are three different markets with three different buyer pools, and the neighborhood median describes none of them. Price the original house to the lot and the floor plan, the pop-top to the last three pop-top sales, and the new build to the west-of-Broadway new-build comparables it actually competes with.

If you are buying

Buyers face a split market. 52% of sales close under asking, the median sale is 0.8% below ask, and only 17% of listings are still on the market after 60 days — so a discount bid on a well-priced ranch in its first two weeks is unlikely to win against the three in ten sales that go over, while a bid 1–2% under asking on a house that has sat four weeks is inside the convention, and a rebuild that has passed 60 days is where the real leverage is. With 17% cash buyers, a financed offer competes. The lot carries the value: a plain ranch on a full-size lot near Broadway will hold it, and if you plan to add a storey, price the permit and the design review into the bid. The condos and townhomes on the edges ($554K median) and the original ranches that sell under $1M — together about 40% of sales — are inside the Ownify Home Fund's $1M ceiling (2% down); the pop-tops and rebuilds above it are financed through an Ownify mortgage rather than the 2%-down program.

Frequently asked questions