Rental comps in Colorado Springs, Colorado

About the Colorado Springs rental market

Colorado Springs sits at an interesting crossroads for rental investors — it's a military-driven market with a resilient demand floor, but it's also matured enough that the easy money plays from the early 2010s are long gone. Fort Carson, Peterson Space Force Base, and the Air Force Academy collectively pump tens of thousands of active-duty personnel and their families into the local rental pool on a rotating basis. That gives the market a built-in absorption mechanism that most mid-sized cities don't have. Single-family rentals dominate, particularly in the southeast quadrant closer to Fort Carson, where three-bedroom homes draw steady demand from NCO-grade families who want yard space and good schools. The north end, around Briargate and Northgate, skews toward higher-income renters and has seen a wave of build-to-rent activity as the tech and defense contractor workforce has grown.

From an underwriting standpoint, Colorado Springs has generally run tighter on cap rates than Midwest markets, typically landing somewhere in the 5 to 6.5 percent range for stabilized single-family assets, though value-add deals and secondary pockets can push higher depending on condition and location. Investors lean hard on BAH rates — Basic Allowance for Housing — as a proxy for what the military renter pool can actually pay, which creates a relatively predictable rent ceiling in certain price bands. Vacancy risk is moderate but not negligible; turnover can spike when units of a particular post rotate out, so geography relative to the base matters more here than it would in a purely civilian market. Colorado has no rent control at the state level, and Springs has stayed out of that conversation, which keeps the regulatory picture clean.

The practical implication when running numbers here is to stress-test your assumptions against BAH ceilings for the relevant pay grades, and make sure you understand which submarket your property actually serves. A house in Fountain underwrites very differently from one in Monument, even if the gross rents look similar on the surface.