GUNNISON COUNTY, COLORADO · ASSESSOR BUILDING RECORDS
The Shape of Gunnison County's Building Stock
A read of 18,312 building records from the county assessor's parcel database — what got built, when, how big, and how it's graded. High-country home to Crested Butte Mountain Resort and Western Colorado University, the county's building stock still carries the fingerprints of a late-century development boom.
Buildings on record
18,312
Across 6 property classes, countywide
Total above-grade area
29.2M sq ft
Averaging 1,597 sq ft per building
Built since 1970
69.7%
Of all buildings with a known year
Peak construction decade
1970s
2,715 buildings — the single busiest decade
01 Construction era
When Gunnison County Was Built
Original year of construction, grouped by decade, for all 18,312 buildings on record. A thin pre‑1900 base of mining‑era structures gives way to a sustained, decades‑long building boom.
Thirty years, one boom. The 1970s–1990s alone added 7,606 buildings — more than the previous 120 years combined (3,416). That stretch tracks with the opening and build-out era of Crested Butte Mountain Resort and a broader Western Slope growth wave. Construction has cooled since 2010: the 2010s and 2020s-to-date total 2,473 buildings, on pace with the 1980s alone.
02 Property mix
Six Classes of Building, Two Different Shares
Share of building count versus share of total floor area, by property type. The two rankings don't match — a sign of how unevenly building size is distributed across classes.
Share of buildings
By count · n = 18,312
Share of floor area
By above-grade sq ft · 29.2M sq ft total
Commercial punches above its weight. Commercial buildings are just 11.0% of the county's structures but 16.9% of its total floor area — the largest average footprint of any class at 2,450 sq ft. Condos run the opposite way: 15.2% of buildings hold only 9.0% of the square footage, averaging a compact 948 sq ft.
03 Building size
Homes Have Grown
Average above-grade square footage of buildings, by decade of construction (pre-1900 through the 2020s-to-date).
Buildings built in the 2020s average 1,969 sq ft — 32% larger than the 1,491 sq ft typical of the 1980s, and the largest of any decade on record. Average size held roughly flat between 1900 and 1960 (1,150–1,400 sq ft) before climbing steadily from the 1980s on.
04 Assessor grades
Construction Quality & Condition
Two ordinal grades the assessor assigns to every building: construction quality (the grade of materials and workmanship as built) and condition (current physical state). Bars run low → high.
Construction quality
13 grades, Poor to Excellent
Condition
Current physical state on record
Quality grades split into two clusters — Average (31.4%) and Fair (29.5%) together account for 61% of all buildings — while condition is far more consolidated: 68.9% of buildings are graded plain Average condition, with well-kept (Good/Excellent/Very Good) outnumbering deteriorated (Below Average/Minimum/Poor/Salvage) grades by roughly 2 to 1.
05 Residential rooms
Bedrooms & Bathrooms
Distribution of bedroom and bathroom counts for the 10,997 buildings on the Residential property roll.
06 Use & occupancy
What Gets Built
The assessor's occupancy field tags each building with a specific use or house style — 385 distinct tags in all. The top 12 account for 68% of every building in the county.
A resort county's seasonal signature. Alongside 5,639 “Conventional” single-family homes, the assessor separately tags 688 as Summer SFR — seasonal, warm‑months‑only residences — plus 415 Cabins, 431 Ranches and 593 Log Homes, a house-style mix that reads distinctly mountain-resort. Only 13.3% of all buildings show any recorded finished-basement improvement (egress window, walkout, etc.), consistent with slab- and crawlspace-style constrution common at altitude.
07 Summary
Property Type Profile
Every class side by side — count, footprint, and average room counts.