Will the Upton Repeat McGregor Square's Condo Value Collapse?

McGregor Square condos are reselling

00K below purchase price. Now Denver's newest luxury tower, the Upton, is entering a market that's changed dramatically since the first shovel hit dirt.

By Derek Schulze · May 12, 2026

Imagine paying $600,000 for a downtown Denver condo, watching a Rockies parade roll past your window — and then discovering your unit is worth

00,000 less than you paid. That's not a hypothetical. That's the reality facing owners at McGregor Square, the mixed-use development anchored to Coors Field that became the last major downtown residential project to hit the market before interest rates rewrote the rules of the game. Now, just blocks away in spirit if not geography, a new luxury tower called the Upton is asking buyers to take that same leap of faith. The question worth asking: will they land, or will history repeat itself?

McGregor Square's Cautionary Tale

The numbers at McGregor Square are jarring. Resale condos in the development — once marketed as the pinnacle of connected urban living, steps from the ballpark, the ball, everything — are now moving at prices roughly

00,000 below what original buyers paid. That's not depreciation in the abstract. That's a six-figure loss on paper for people who bought in good faith during a very different rate environment. When those buyers closed, a 30-year fixed mortgage felt manageable. The Fed funds rate was near zero. The math worked, or at least it worked well enough to sign on the dotted line.

That math no longer exists. And the Upton is about to find out exactly what the new math looks like.

What Is the Upton, Exactly?

The Upton is Denver's latest luxury residential high-rise, bringing a polished, amenity-heavy condo product to a market that increasingly questions whether that product has a buyer. The development is sleek — the interiors are finished at a level that photographs well, with the kind of common spaces that blur the line between residential building and boutique hotel.

But beautiful buildings don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in a market. And right now, Denver's market has some very specific things to say about luxury condos.

The Rent vs. Own Calculation Nobody Wants to Do (But Should)

Here's where the story gets uncomfortable. In the same neighborhoods where the Upton is positioning itself, a one-bedroom luxury apartment is renting for around

,000 a month. That's it. Two grand, and you're in. No down payment. No HOA. No special assessments. No skin in the game when the market shifts.

Now run the numbers on buying at the Upton. The units currently showing as pending in MLS data are clustered in the $300,000 to $400,000 range — notably, these are the smaller units, not the penthouses, which remain stubbornly active. Take a $400,000 purchase price. Put 10% down. Finance $360,000 at current rates hovering near 6%. Your principal and interest payment alone is pushing

,400 a month.

On the smaller units at the Upton, HOA fees are advertised in the $400 to $500 per month range. On the larger units, you're looking at nearly

,000 a month in HOA alone. So on a $400,000 unit with a $500 HOA, your all-in monthly housing cost before insurance and taxes is somewhere north of

,900 — and realistically, when you factor everything in, you're clearing $3,200 to $3,500 a month easy.

Against a

,000-

The Vancouver Question

The developers behind the Upton have a track record worth examining — specifically in Vancouver, one of the most condo-dense, vertically-oriented cities in North America. Vancouver's downtown core is a genuine urban ecosystem. People live there, work there, raise kids there, age there. Condo culture isn't an alternative to single-family living in Vancouver — for many residents, it simply is living.

Denver is not Vancouver. This isn't a knock on Denver — it's just geography, culture, and decades of development pattern. In Colorado, single-family homes have historically been where the appreciation lives. The suburban lot, the Front Range ranch house, the mountain town Victorian — these are the assets that have held value and climbed. Condos, and especially urban high-rise condos, have faced a harder road, and that road got significantly steeper when interest rates rose.

The developers almost certainly know what they're doing from a construction and design standpoint. The Upton's finishes and amenities reflect serious experience. But experience building luxury condos in a city that was built for dense urban living doesn't automatically translate to a city that still largely aspires to a backyard. What sells in Yaletown doesn't automatically sell in LoDo.

Timing Is Everything (And the Timing Is Complicated)

Here's the part that deserves some real empathy: the Upton project was conceived and launched during a fundamentally different interest rate environment. When developers were penciling out pro formas and presales, the cost of money was near historic lows. A mortgage at 3% or 3.5% makes a $400,000 condo look very different than a mortgage at 7%. The whole financial logic of ownership — build equity faster than you'd burn money on rent — shifts dramatically when rates double.

They started this project in one market. They're delivering into a completely different one. That's not bad planning, necessarily — real estate development timelines are long, and nobody predicted the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades. But it is a risk that's now landing squarely on buyers rather than developers, and buyers are noticing.

The fact that the pending units are concentrated in the $300,000-$400,000 range rather than the penthouses tells its own story. The most attainable units are moving. The trophy units — the ones that represent the Upton's highest revenue and its most compelling marketing imagery — are sitting. That's a pattern worth watching. Penthouse buyers aren't necessarily more rate-sensitive (they're often cash or cash-heavy), but they are more discretionary. They don't need to buy. And discretionary buyers in a murky market have a reliable habit of waiting.

So What Happens Next?

No one can say with certainty whether the Upton will follow McGregor Square into loss-at-resale territory. The two projects aren't identical, the buyer pools aren't identical, and the locations carry different variables. But the headwinds are real and they're not going away quickly.

For rates to meaningfully change the rent-vs-own calculus in favor of buying, you'd need to see either significant rate decreases (possible but not imminent based on current Fed signals) or meaningful price reductions on the units themselves. Neither is guaranteed.

What is clear is that Denver's condo market — particularly at the luxury level — is navigating a genuinely difficult stretch. The single-family home market in Colorado has shown remarkable resilience because demand for that product type runs deep in the culture here. The luxury condo market doesn't have that same cultural bedrock. It's selling a lifestyle to a segment of buyers who largely have to be convinced that urban vertical living is worth a premium over renting the same lifestyle by the month.

McGregor Square's losses are a data point. The Upton's pending sales pattern is a data point. The