Colorado's Seller's Property Disclosure form got a full rewrite this year, and every residential seller in the state, Cherry Hills Village included, has had to use the new version since January 1, 2026. The form asks more of sellers than the one it replaced: adverse material facts, radon history, water source detail, a written duty to update the buyer if something new surfaces before closing. What it does not ask, and cannot ask, is which building code edition governs whatever permit is sitting open on the property. That question belongs to a different document entirely, one most buyers never think to pull until an inspector flags something the seller genuinely didn't know to mention.
That gap matters more in Cherry Hills Village right now than almost anywhere else in the Denver area, because the city changed its adopted building code at nearly the same moment the state changed its disclosure form. A buyer closing on a move-in ready home in Old Cherry Hills will likely never notice. A buyer closing on a teardown candidate, or inheriting a stalled remodel permit, is stepping directly into the seam between the two.
The Colorado Real Estate Commission adopted the new form, SPD19, on August 5, 2025, and made it mandatory for use on contracts signed on or after January 1, 2026. Sellers complete it themselves, not their broker, answering from their current actual knowledge as of the date they sign, and they're on the hook to supplement it in writing if a new adverse material fact turns up before closing. It's a real upgrade in what sellers have to put on paper. The form also says plainly that it isn't a warranty and isn't a substitute for inspection.
Here's the practical limit. A seller who pulled a permit in 2025 for a kitchen remodel or a pool house, and whose contractor finished the work under the code that applied at the time, has nothing to hide and nothing to disclose, because as far as they know, the project is done. What they may not know is that Cherry Hills Village amended Chapter 18 of its municipal code in 2025, formally adopting the 2024 editions of the International Building Code, the International Residential Code, and the International Existing Building Code, effective at the start of 2026. If that 2025 permit is still open when a buyer's inspector walks the property, the inspection now runs against a newer code baseline than the plans were drawn to. The disclosure form has no box for that, because the seller doesn't have that knowledge to disclose.
The transition rule is simple to state and easy to miss. Work that received final inspection and closed out under the prior code edition stands as approved. Anything still open when the 2024 editions took effect is now measured against the new standard, whether or not the original plans anticipated it. A buyer closing on a home with no active permits will likely never touch Chapter 18 at all. A buyer closing on a scrape-and-rebuild lot is filing a New Single Family Dwelling permit today, under the 2024 code, from the first submittal. A buyer inheriting someone else's stalled project is the one who needs to ask, specifically, whether the existing permit closed before the transition or is still sitting open.
The city's own permit rules add a second layer of timing risk that has nothing to do with code editions at all. An application is deemed abandoned ninety days after filing if it isn't pursued in good faith, and an issued permit becomes invalid if work hasn't started within ninety days or is suspended for that long. Extensions exist, up to two four-month periods, but each one carries an escalating fee, a quarter of the original permit cost for the first extension and half of it for the second. A buyer who assumes a seller's stalled permit is still live should confirm that before writing an offer, not after.
Two parts of the city carry most of the current scrape-and-rebuild activity: the Belleview corridor and Cherry Hills Park, where aging ranch homes from the 1960s and 1970s sit on premium lots that are steadily being replaced with new estate construction. The arithmetic in these two pockets has been fairly steady, with older homes trading for the land and existing structure somewhere in the one-and-a-half to two-million-dollar range, and the new construction that replaces them listing well above three million. That spread is exactly why permit timing matters more here than the price-per-square-foot line on a comp sheet. A buyer in these corridors isn't only buying a lot. They're buying whatever is left of a permit history, and as of 2026, that history has a code-edition seam running through the middle of it.
Old Cherry Hills sits at the other end of the spectrum, with very little active turnover. Realtor.com counted just five active listings there as of March 2026, and most of what does trade tends to be a move-in ready sale rather than a teardown, which is a large part of why the code transition barely registers for buyers shopping that particular pocket.
A second friction point sits underneath the first, and it applies whether or not a buyer is planning a rebuild. A meaningful share of Cherry Hills Village parcels still run on septic rather than municipal sewer. Converting one to the other is not a footnote. The Cherry Hills Village Sanitation District, formed in 1974 and now maintaining 47 miles of sewer main across roughly 1,150 served residences, requires a sewer tap permit and a district inspection for any property converting from septic, and on parcels inside Buell Mansion, Covington, or the Hillcrest Water and Sanitation District, additional tap fees apply on top of the district's own charges. Some of these connections also require a separate inspection from the City of Englewood, since Cherry Hills Village contracts out its wastewater treatment rather than running its own plant.
None of that shows up in a listing description, and none of it shows up in a median price. It shows up at the inspection objection deadline, when a buyer's team learns for the first time that the home under contract is one of the ones still on septic, in a city where sewer access is not universal and converting is a real capital project with its own paperwork attached.
Portal data on Cherry Hills Village disagrees with itself in a way that reflects the city's structure more than any data error. Redfin reported a median sale price of $4,999,000 in the city in March 2026. Realtor.com's median listing price for the same month came in at $4,222,500. Zillow's home value index sat closer to $3.2 million around the same window. None of those figures are wrong. They're measuring a low-volume, three-ZIP luxury market where a single multimillion-dollar closing on any given street can move a monthly median by seven figures. A buyer or seller weighing a specific transaction gets very little from the citywide number. What actually prices a Cherry Hills Village property is the pocket it sits in, the parcel size, the utility type, and now, the permit history connecting it to one building code or the other.
Does a permit that closed before 2026 need to be reviewed again under the new code? No. A permit that received final inspection and closed under the prior code edition stands as approved. The 2024 editions apply going forward, not retroactively, to work already finaled.
If my property is on septic and it's working fine, do I have to convert before I sell? Not automatically. Conversion is a capital project with its own permit fees through the Cherry Hills Village Sanitation District, and in some subdistricts, additional fees to the City of Englewood. Documenting the system's condition and service history is often more useful to a transaction than converting on a deadline.
Does the new disclosure form ask about open permits? It asks sellers to disclose based on current actual knowledge, so an open permit should appear if the seller is aware of it. It does not identify which code edition that permit will be reviewed against. That question belongs to the buyer's own due diligence, not the paperwork.
If you're weighing a purchase or sale that touches a teardown lot, a stalled permit, or a home still on septic in Cherry Hills Village, Steve Charlett can walk through what the 2026 code transition and disclosure rules actually mean for your specific parcel before you write or accept an offer. Contact Us to start that conversation.
