Fewer building permits for new single-family homes are being issued in Summit County. Industry professionals think they might know why.

Tripp Fay/For the Summit Daily News
The height of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unexpected bump in building permits issued in Summit County during 2020 and 2021, but the county now finds itself in a position where it is doling out fewer and fewer permits each year.

Realtors, builders and county officials say a few factors come into play when it comes to a decline in building permits including dwindling inventory of available and buildable land, pandemic-related impacts and climbing construction costs.
David Rynes, executive vice president of project development at Pinnacle Mountain Homes, said the impacts COVID-19 brought differed from what his industry anticipated would happen in mountain towns.
Rynes said his company’s focus during the onset of the pandemic was on how to keep people employed amid a national lockdown which was expected to slow the construction industry, but that never happened. Instead the company saw a spike in business and if anything needed more employees as opposed to laying people off. He said, unexpectedly, project timelines became accelerated.
“The pandemic almost accelerated the cadence of a lot of our projects and (they happened) perhaps sooner than they would have otherwise,” he said, noting Pinnacle having its own internal team of key players in the construction process like architects and interior designers helped boost the process.
In 2019, Summit County issued 78 building permits for single-family residences. Spokesperson Adrienne Isaac clarified not all building permits issued are reflections of finished products since not every permit becomes a finished product. In 2020 the county issued 88 building permits, and in 2021 it issued 80.
Then in 2022, the number of building permits dropped to 66, and the county also issued 66 in 2023. By late December 2024, the county had issued 62 building permits.
Colorado Association of Realtors President Dana Cottrell said following the height of the pandemic she saw building and construction begin to slow, and from what the builders she works with told her, it was largely due to a diminishing industry workforce.
She said shrinking construction crews prolonged building processes to take around double the time in some cases. Rising construction costs had a hand in the matter too, she added.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, the price of processed wood product quadrupled at the start of the pandemic, and the entity found this could be tied to a shortage at that time of workers in the forest products industry.
Additionally, increased risk of wildfire in Colorado’s High Country, leading to hikes in homeowners insurance, she said, began to dissuade people from building in the area.
Cottrell said aside from these factors, one significant event had impacts on the level of interest in new construction that real estate industry professionals have come to expect every four years: the election.

She said during election years, she’s getting questions indicating hesitancy from clients such as “who’s going to wind up in office, and what’s that going to mean?” and “how’s that going to change my life?”
“When people are looking at putting a whole bunch of money down, they get a little worried about those things,” she said.
Rynes said the sheer amount of desirable and buildable land reducing year to year will make for less building permits for new single-family residences being issued solely based on inventory.

Many towns in Summit County are nearing residential building caps for new constructions set by officials. For instance, according to Blue River’s town manager Michelle Eddy, the town only has 13 buildable plots of land left. Previously she has said some of those plots are on steep hillside and near wetlands, which require a “creative” designing process for new construction.
A 2023 analysis showed Breckenridge is at 93% of its residential building cap. A December 2022 report showed Frisco was at around 97% of its cap set by officials, Dillion was around 77% residentially built out and Silverthorne was around 90% residentially built out.
“Some of the properties that are left are either perhaps less desirable or more challenging properties to build on and people go through the process of due diligence and find out that there’s wetlands or that the lot is really steep and there’s going to be shoring that happens,” he said. “Those are additional cost implications to the projects.”
He said it’s likely the county will continue to head in the redirection of a redevelopment mindset as opposed to a new development mindset, resulting in less new building permits and more permits related to remodeling and rebuilding, because of this.

Rynes said Pinnacle Mountain Homes has strong lines of communications with builders in communities like Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Big Sky, Montana who also have a lessened supply of land to build on and this mindset is spreading across mountain town markets.
The concept of “scraping” a home, or demolishing a smaller home on a lot and putting a much larger one on it, has lingered in conversations among Breckenridge officials for the past several months. Official’s concerns mostly lie in increased energy consumption for larger homes in comparison to smaller ones. While no concrete decisions have been made, officials have completed requiring some sort of energy offset for “scraping.”

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