If you tour Three Springs today, the pitch mostly writes itself. There's a Starbucks pulling shots by the roundabout on Wilson Gulch Drive, a Subaru dealership and a Maverik gas station anchoring the corner, an assisted living community with its own care staff, and a hotel working its way through city approvals. Durango School District broke ground on Three Springs Elementary this spring. Most of what this neighborhood promised on paper a few years ago is now sitting there in brick and asphalt.
One promise hasn't caught up. Three Springs was supposed to come with a paved trail connection that let residents bike or walk into downtown Durango without merging onto Highway 160. That promise predates the Starbucks, the school, and the hotel combined, and it still isn't finished.
That gap matters if you're weighing a new build at Three Springs against something older and closer to downtown. The price difference between the two is easy enough to look up. What that price difference actually buys you, in terms of what's done and what's still years away, takes more digging. Here's what turns up.
The Numbers Don't Agree, and That's the Point
Ask three sources what Durango's housing market is doing right now and you'll get three different answers, not because anyone is wrong, but because they're measuring different slices of a small market.
Three Springs itself has traded at a trailing twelve-month median of roughly $669,000, up about 12% from the prior year, with homes typically taking around 51 days to sell. That's a longer runway than you'd expect in a market people describe as tight, and it's worth sitting with.
Zoom out to Durango overall and the picture shifts depending on which tracker you check. One national home-value index put the city's average home value at $765,585 as of the end of July 2026, up 3.2% over the prior year. A different tracker, measuring the three months ending June 2026, put the median sale price closer to $750,000, up nearly 20% year over year, with days on market climbing from about 10 days the previous year to 24 days this year. Only 63 homes closed in June 2026, barely more than the 61 that closed in June a year earlier.
That's not a contradiction so much as a symptom. When your monthly closed-sale count sits in the double digits, a handful of expensive closings or one slow month can swing a median by tens of thousands of dollars. The headline number is real, but it's noisy enough that no single month should be read as gospel. Those citywide figures also blend Three Springs in with everywhere else, including the older in-town core, which has reportedly stayed tight enough on its own to sit at roughly 2.8 months of supply, the kind of number that still favors sellers even while the citywide trend line bounces around.
What Three Springs Actually Delivered
Back in 2023, the corner of Wilson Gulch and Three Springs Boulevard was mostly a construction site with a gas station and a car dealership. That's no longer true.
The Starbucks location at Highway 160 and Wilson Gulch is open and currently hiring baristas. Mesa Verde Estates, once described in city planning documents as an assisted living center "under development," now operates as a working memory care and assisted living community. The Hilton Home2Suites, a 107-room hotel proposed for 32 Miners Court, cleared a preliminary design plan approval from Durango City Council. The Subaru dealership and Maverik gas station that existed years ago are still there, doing what anchor tenants do.
The biggest addition arrived this spring. Durango School District broke ground on Three Springs Elementary in May 2026, with construction expected to run through late 2027 or early 2028 so the building can be fully commissioned before students move in for the 2028-29 school year. Superintendent Karen Cheser described the design as one that "connects students to the outdoors and natural elements while creating flexible, future-focused learning spaces." Florida Mesa Elementary's current principal, Andrea Guttormson, is already slated to lead the new school when it opens.
Put together, that's a neighborhood that has largely closed the gap between its original sales rendering and what actually exists on the ground.
What Hasn't Caught Up: The Trail
The SMART 160 Trail was funded back around 2011 with $1.7 million in state transit dollars, meant to give Three Springs residents a paved route into central Durango without using the highway. Fifteen years later, the city's own project page puts the completed distance at about one mile out of a final build-out the city separately describes as somewhere between 2.6 and 3 miles, depending on which city document you read. Even the city isn't fully consistent about how long the finished trail will be, which tells you something about how much is still unsettled.
What's built sits mostly on the western and eastern ends, near Three Springs itself and near the Animas River Trail. The middle section, the part that would actually connect the two, has been the holdup for years. As of the most recent city update, officials are still in discussions with a property owner to finalize an acceptable alignment for one of the final segments. The city has also said plainly that it expects to be able to fund construction of one segment per year, which means the remaining stretch is a multi-year project even in a best case.
A Three Springs resident named Steve Self put the daily reality of this gap in blunt terms a few years back, describing it as "impossible to ride a scooter or anything on Highway 160 around that curve." That quote is a few years old, but the trail's completion status hasn't moved enough to make it outdated. If you're picturing an easy bike ride into downtown as part of your Three Springs lifestyle, that picture is still mostly aspirational.
What This Actually Means If You're Choosing Between Them
| Three Springs | City of Durango, Overall | |
|---|---|---|
| Trailing 12-month median price | About $669,000, up roughly 12% year over year | About $750,000 over the three months ending June 2026, per national tracking data |
| Typical days on market | About 51 days | About 24 days as of June 2026, up from about 10 days the year before |
| On-site commercial anchors | Starbucks, Subaru dealership, Maverik, Mesa Verde Estates, Hilton approved | Downtown's retail and dining corridor already built out, separate from any Three Springs growth |
| New school pipeline | Groundbreaking held May 2026, opening targeted for 2028-29 | No comparable new-construction school project underway |
| Trail connection to downtown | About one mile of a planned 2.6 to 3 mile route complete, remaining segments funded one at a time | Already within walking distance of downtown, no trail dependency |
| Supply condition | Longer days on market suggest more room to negotiate | Citywide figures are noisy, but the in-town core alone has reportedly sat at about 2.8 months of supply |
Neither side of this table is a better or worse choice. They're different bets. Buying in Three Springs is a bet that the trail eventually catches up, that in the meantime you're fine driving the mile or so into town, and that the finished retail and a new school pipeline are worth more to you today than an unfinished mobility promise. Buying in-town is a bet that immediate walkability is worth competing harder for, in a market where supply hasn't loosened up the way some of the national headlines suggest.
What you shouldn't do is pay a premium today for a trail connection that's still years from finished. That's the one line item in the Three Springs pitch that hasn't kept pace with everything else, and it's the detail most likely to surprise a buyer who assumed the marketing materials described something already built.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Decide
Is the SMART 160 Trail still moving forward? Yes, according to the city's latest project updates, but in segments funded one budget year at a time, with no published completion date for the full route.
Does Three Springs have its own elementary school yet? Not yet. Construction broke ground in May 2026 and the district's target opening is the 2028-29 school year.
Why do national home-value trackers sometimes disagree with each other for the same month? Durango's monthly closed-sale counts are small, often in the low sixties, so a handful of high-end or low-end closings can move a median noticeably. That's a good reason to look at more than one number before drawing a conclusion about where the market stands.
If you're trying to figure out which of these trade-offs actually fits your plans, that's the kind of comparison worth talking through with someone who watches both markets closely. Judi Mora has spent more than two decades working in La Plata County and can walk you through what's finished, what's still years out, and what that means for your specific search, whether you're eyeing Three Springs, downtown, or somewhere in between. Reach out to request a free home valuation and start the conversation.
