Palo Park & Four Mile Creek, Boulder: home prices, who is buying, and how homes really sell here

Updated September 2026 · Based on 266 recorded sales Jan 2021 – Sep 2026, 133 verified asking prices and 279 classified buyers

Photo: Logan Gutierrez on Unsplash (Unsplash License)

Palo Park and Four Mile Creek are northeast Boulder's family subdivisions: 1980s–2000s houses on cul-de-sacs either side of the Diagonal Highway, with townhomes and condos on the south side, three parks, the Fourmile Canyon Creek path and a straight bike ride to campus and the federal labs. It is the closest thing Boulder has to a workhorse market — a 2025–26 median of $932K right at the city median, homes selling at exactly 100% of asking, under one in ten cash buyers, and one of the highest shares of university and school-district buyers in the city.

The neighborhood

The sub-market runs from about 28th–30th Street east to 47th Street and from the Diagonal Highway (CO 119) north to Jay Road, with Palo Park proper along Palo Parkway on the north side of the Diagonal and the Four Mile Creek subdivision further east. It is the newest large residential area inside the city: Palo Park was built out in the 1980s and Four Mile Creek mostly in the late 1990s and 2000s, on former farmland along Fourmile Canyon Creek. Less than 1% of homes sold here since 2021 were built before 1950 and 41% since 2000, with a median build year of 1987. The layout is suburban — cul-de-sacs rather than through streets, attached garages, tree-lined but not gridded.

Two markets share the boundary. North of the Diagonal, and in Four Mile Creek, the stock is detached New Traditional and Craftsman-style houses and some duplexes on lots around 6,000 sq ft; the typical sale is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,700 sq ft home. South of the highway are the townhome and condo complexes and a manufactured-home community, which is where the 30% of sales that are condos and townhomes come from, at a $433K median. That split, plus the difference between a 1,400 sq ft Palo Park two-storey and a 3,000 sq ft Four Mile Creek house, is why the price range since 2021 runs from $180K to $2.44M and why yearly medians here swing with what happened to sell.

The neighborhood is built around its parks: North Palo Park (tennis), East Palo Park (playground and paved paths), South Palo Park's open lawn, and Pleasant View Fields for soccer and rugby, with Howard Heuston Park's skate and dog parks and Valmont Bike Park just south of the highway. There is no commercial center — errands mean the 28th Street strip or the Diagonal — but the multi-use path network makes it a straightforward ride to CU, NIST and NOAA, and RTD serves 28th Street and the Diagonal. Schools are Columbine Elementary, Casey Middle and Boulder High for most addresses, assigned by the school district's address finder rather than by neighborhood. Turnover is 33–58 sales a year.

Where Palo Park / Four Mile Creek is

Map centered on the 261 geocoded sales in assessor neighborhood 124; the neighborhood boundary is the Boulder County Assessor's appraisal area, not a formal city boundary.

Homes and prices in Palo Park / Four Mile Creek

Seven in ten sales are houses, and the 2025–26 house median is $1.12M; the townhomes and condos south of the Diagonal have a $433K median that brings the blended figure to $932K, essentially at Boulder's $948K median. The per-square-foot figure is where Palo Park is cheap: at $449 against Boulder's $552, it is 19% below the city, because these are newer, larger, more efficient houses on suburban lots without the land premium of the older neighborhoods west of 28th. The yearly medians need care. House medians rose from $1.07M in 2021 to $1.51M in 2023 on a run of large Four Mile Creek sales and have since come down to $1.14M in 2025 and $1.02M in partial 2026 as smaller Palo Park houses made up more of the mix; the condo medians of $778K and $950K in 2023–24 reflect a handful of duplex and townhome sales rather than the $300K–$500K units that dominate the south side. Read the trend as flat over five years, with the mix doing the moving.

The typical home sold in 2025–26 has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1,711 sq ft, on a 6,238 sq ft lot; the median build year is 1987, with 0.8% of homes built before 1950 and 41.4% since 2000. Prices run from $180K to $2.44M.

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 $932,000, a conventional purchase with 20% down at a 6.76% 30-year rate costs about $5,540 a month including taxes and insurance, which lenders would typically want to see backed by a household income near $237,424 and roughly $205,040 in cash at closing. 49.2% of all Boulder sales in 2025–26 closed below this neighborhood's median.

Who is buying in Palo Park / Four Mile Creek

Palo Park is where Boulder's educators and researchers buy. University and research buyers are the largest group at 18% against 12% city-wide — higher-education and research employers are over-represented by a third — and primary and secondary education employers, mostly the school district, are nearly double their Boulder share (5% vs 3%). Tech is second at 18% (Boulder 16%), health care about matches the city at 12%, and hospitality and travel employers are the other over-index. What is under-represented is the self-employed and small-business buyer (3% vs 6%) and consulting and professional services (7% vs 9%) — this is a salaried, institutional buyer pool, and it finances: only 9% of purchases are cash, less than half Boulder's 20.5%.

Share of 279 classified buyers on 193 transactions with an identified employer; industry attribution only, no individual buyer identified.

How Palo Park / Four Mile Creek prices — and how to play it

B   Ownify competitiveness index 61 / 100 — the second-highest grade Ownify assigns, which in Boulder means sells at or over asking: homes with these characteristics in this sub-market close at or above their asking price more often than the city as a whole. Palo Park earns it with an unusually high share of sales at exactly the asking price rather than with bidding wars.

If you are selling

The Palo Park convention is to list about 1.8% above market value and sell at asking: the median sale here is exactly 100% of the list price, with 29% of sales over asking, 43% under and the remaining 29% at the number — one of the highest at-ask shares of any large Boulder sub-market. 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 84% at 112%. The curve is flat, so a bold ask costs little in odds, but it costs time — listings above 110% of value take a median 49–55 days in Boulder against 38 at value — and Palo Park already runs slower than its pricing suggests: a median 42 days and 26% of listings still on the market after 60 days, because the family buyer here shops carefully and the next comparable house in the same subdivision is usually a few weeks away. Because 93% of the asking price passes through to the sale price in Boulder, price to the comparable within your subdivision and hold; there is no reward for under-pricing in a market where buyers pay the number and rarely more than a percent or two above it.

Split the comparables by side of the Diagonal and by subdivision. A Four Mile Creek two-storey, a Palo Park ranch and a south-side townhome are three products with three buyer pools; the neighborhood median describes none of them, and the swings in yearly medians here are almost entirely mix. Condition matters less than in the 1960s neighborhoods — most of this stock is under 40 years old — so pricing turns on square footage, lot, garage and the walk to the parks.

If you are buying

Buyers should expect to pay the asking price, not much more and not much less. 43% of sales close under asking and 29% over, the median sale is exactly at ask, and a bid 1–2% under asking on a house that has been listed five weeks is inside the convention — with 26% of listings still available after 60 days, patience is rewarded on the ones that were priced to last year's comparables. With only 9% cash buyers, a financed offer with an appraisal contingency is the norm here rather than a handicap. The townhomes and condos south of the Diagonal ($433K median) and the smaller Palo Park houses — 55% of sales here close under $1M — are inside the Ownify Home Fund's $1M ceiling (2% down); the larger Four Mile Creek houses above it are financed through an Ownify mortgage rather than the 2%-down program. The 30th & Iris corridor immediately south has more of the same townhome stock at lower prices.

Frequently asked questions