LANDBRIEFING
BY KAUFMAN REAL ESTATE & CONSULTING
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Mountain Watch

Land and housing fundamentals across America's mountain resort and gateway towns, tracked continuously and scored by asset class — affordable & workforce housing, market rate, luxury, land, commercial, and hospitality — the same way the main LandBriefing watchlist scores metro land opportunity, extended for where mountain-town real estate actually breaks down by use.

Launch set · 10 markets · updated September 2026
Where We're Watching

Approximate positions for relative geographic reference, not a precise cartographic map. Click a market's card below for the full breakdown.

Buy Window
Selective / Steady
Caution / Wait
Methodology
30%
Momentum
Price trend, sales velocity, and transaction volume vs. the prior year, weighing multiple sources against each other rather than trusting one.
25%
Catalyst
The scale and specificity of a named 2025-2026 development, resort-operator investment, or institutional transaction.
25%
Housing Opportunity
The size of the workforce/affordable housing gap set against how funded and real the local response actually is — a bond passed and land bought scores higher than a stated goal alone.
20%
Supply Constraint
How structurally scarce buildable land is — federal/public land share, build-out caps, permit trend — since scarcity is what gives a mountain town's land its premium.

Every figure on this page is dated and sourced to a specific report — Census Building Permits Survey (via FRED), Zillow ZHVI, Redfin, local MLS/board-of-Realtors reports, named news coverage, and public housing-authority or municipal records. Where sources disagreed or a figure couldn't be verified to a specific date, we said so in the notes rather than smoothing it into a single confident number. This is a research snapshot, not a live feed, and should be treated as a starting point for your own underwriting, not a substitute for it.

Reading the asset-class signals below:

Strong — real, funded, or actively closing activity Emerging — a real, dated signal, early stage Selective — mixed or thin data, worth a second look Watch — data gap, conflicting signal, or a cooling trend
The Watchlist

This is the launch set.

Mountain Watch grows the same way the main LandBriefing watchlist does — new markets added and existing ones re-verified on an ongoing basis. Create a free account for the full national watchlist, or get in touch about a specific market or asset class.

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