Six plan.md files, one per new property recommended in Where the Colorado Money Actually Is (prepared August 9, 2026). Every plan leads with the money model, because the report's central finding is that a page with no revenue relationship attached earns nothing regardless of where it ranks.

Written August 9, 2026. Domain availability checked that day via RDAP. Updated August 10, 2026: venue listing price settled at $70, Medicare economics researched, water rights dropped.

What changed on August 10

Two of the three open questions got answered, and one property got cut.

• Wedding venues: $70 a month, settled (Annette). That was the number the whole plan waited on. Ten venues is $8,400 a year and it does not depend on ranking for anything. This moves from conditional to build.
• Medicare: the answer is public and it is better than assumed. CMS caps 2027 Medicare Advantage broker commission at $725 for the initial enrollment and $363 for every renewal year after. Brokers buy exclusive leads at $20 to $55 and live transfers at $55 to $135, and they bid up to $28 a click on medicare broker. This is the only model in the whole portfolio with a recurring revenue line. It also carries a real regulatory burden, which the plan now covers.
• Colorado land and water: dropped (Annette, August 10). She does not want to deal with water rights. The keyword was genuinely underpriced and the strategic fit was the worst on the list, so this is the right cut. Not archived, just gone.

The six

She owns none of these domains. Her 39 Cloudflare zones were checked; there is no overlap.

What is still blocking each one

One partnership conversation, not a price quote. Medicare is the only remaining relationship gate, and it is not about money any more. A site generating Medicare leads is a Third-Party Marketing Organization under CMS rules, with a mandatory disclaimer, written-consent requirements and full call recording. The clean structure is to publish the content and hand traffic to one licensed Colorado agency that already carries that machinery.

SERP checks, which cost a few dollars in API calls.

• Medicare: medicare advantage plans is 301,000 searches a month at competition index 14 with bids to $23.66. That is the most valuable unchecked result page in this entire body of work.
• Estes Park: difficulty 12 on a 33,100-volume hotel term is not credible until a live result page says so.
• Colorado Springs: none of its four head terms was verified.
• Wedding: colorado wedding venues before committing to the statewide pillar. The Estes Park term is already verified winnable.

One is genuinely ready to build today. The homeowner property's core keyword, colorado hoa laws, is verified with seven of ten organic slots held by ordinary content pages, at difficulty 1 and a $7.45 CPC.

A note on timing

Medicare annual enrollment runs October 15 to December 7 and the search volume is brutally concentrated in it: medicare advantage plans runs 673,000 in October against 165,000 in June. Content has to be indexed and ranking by early September. That means the 2026 season is already gone, so the Medicare property is a 2027-season build, and the year in between is the authority runway.

What was explicitly ruled out, and stays ruled out

• Radon (radon testing colorado, $9.27 CPC, difficulty 22). Verified live: a government wall plus a Maps pack. The report includes it as a warning, not a recommendation. Do not build it.
• Insurance, legal services, LLC formation, addiction treatment, senior living placement, apartments and rentals, local home services. All verified or measured as closed. Details in the source report.
• Anything procedural. Vehicle registration cost looked like the strongest find in the whole sweep on the numbers and is a wall of dmv.colorado.gov under a complete AI Overview. The fast sort: procedural questions belong to government sites, interpretive questions are open.

The portfolio work that comes before any new property

The report's own "do this first" list is not on this page because none of it needs a new domain, and all of it outranks everything above:

1. Build the Boulder moving-company price comparison on newtoboulder.com. 880 searches, difficulty 22, $10.94 CPC, top-of-page bids $14.60 to $51.39, no local pack, aggregators already on page one. The single best find in the sweep, inside a site she already owns. Structurally the same build as tasteboulder's 382 scraped menu prices.
2. Set up a real estate referral relationship before writing another neighborhood page. Roughly $4,810 per closed Boulder-area transaction. One of those pays for a year of everything else. Every neighborhood guide on newtoboulder currently has no revenue attached.
3. Repeat the Gunbarrel template on Niwot (12,100 a month, difficulty 10, 49% bigger than Gunbarrel) and Nederland (8,100, difficulty 6, needs a charter decision first under the Gold Hill precedent).
4. Fix the two dead comparison pages. boulder vs longmont and boulder vs louisville return no Google Ads data at all. Retarget at boulder vs denver (390) and fort collins vs boulder (140).
5. Answer the open charter question on whether boulderthingstodo and tasteboulder should be one domain. The report's closing warning: adding properties while the existing ones are thin makes the same mistake twice.

Cross-property boundaries to settle in writing

• estes park wedding venues belongs to the wedding property. The Estes Park property owns the "where your guests stay" page that hangs off it.
• colorado closing costs (state term) belongs to the homeowner property. newtoboulder takes "what closing actually costs in Boulder County." They cross-link and never compete on the same query.
• Nederland needs a split decision in BOULDER-TOPIC-BOUNDARIES.md before either newtoboulder or boulderthingstodo writes a word.

Standing rules that apply to all seven builds

• Static Astro plus Cloudflare Pages, one D1 database per project, validate.config.json written at project creation.
• No sticky or fixed elements. Full-bleed sections with a centered container. Zero horizontal overflow at 320 / 390 / 768 / 1280 / 1920 / 2560.
• Tables never hide columns.
• Run the site validator and look at the screenshots before calling anything done.
• Never submit a new site to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools or IndexNow until Annette says it is ready to be indexed. Live and indexed are two separate decisions.

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Property 1: Colorado Retiree Finance, Medicare first

Status: UPGRADED TO BUILD-WORTHY on August 10, 2026. The blocking question, what a Medicare enrollment is worth, now has a hard published answer, and it is much better than the plan assumed. Proposed domain: coloradoretiree.com (available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026) Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, verified arbitrage rank 5, plus Google Ads and CMS research run August 10, 2026 Written: August 9, 2026. Rewritten August 10, 2026 with the Medicare economics.

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What changed

The August 9 plan said this was a hold until a Medicare broker named a number. Nobody has to name one. CMS publishes the maximum commission every year, and it is a public document.

What one Medicare Advantage enrollment pays a broker

CMS 2027 maximum fair market value, national rate (all states except CA, NJ, CT, PA and DC, which pay more):

Carriers are not required to pay the full maximum, though many historically do. Renewal compensation is capped at 50% of fair market value, which is where the $363 comes from.

That is a recurring $363 a year per member, for as long as they stay enrolled. No other monetization model in the entire Colorado sweep has a renewal line. Real estate referrals pay once. Solar leads pay once. Directory listings churn. A Medicare book of business compounds.

What brokers pay to buy a lead

Add 20 to 35% during the annual enrollment period.

Compare that to $725. A broker paying $55 for an exclusive lead who closes one in six is at $330 acquisition against $725 first-year revenue plus $363 a year after. That is why the economics here work, and it is why the ad rates below are what they are.

What brokers pay per click

Google Ads endpoint, United States, English, pulled August 10, 2026. Following the report's rule, treat cpc as an upper bound and high_top_of_page_bid as the sober valuation.

And on the wholesale side, what lead vendors pay to reach brokers, which is a useful floor on what the whole channel is worth:

The headline finding: medicare advantage plans is 301,000 searches a month at competition index 14 with top-of-page bids to $23.66. Three hundred thousand searches, LOW competition label, and advertisers bidding above $20. Nothing else found anywhere in the Colorado work is remotely that size at that price. Whether it is actually enterable is the open question, and it is now the single most valuable SERP check on the whole list.

The regulatory wall, and it is real

Before any of this gets built: a site that generates Medicare leads is a Third-Party Marketing Organization under CMS rules, and TPMOs are regulated. This is not a footnote, it is a design constraint.

What that means concretely:

• The TPMO disclaimer is mandatory on marketing materials, websites, calls, emails and social posts. If the site does not represent every plan in a service area, it must carry the exact CMS language: "We do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent [number] organizations which offer [number] products in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-MEDICARE, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) for help with plan choices."
• Prior express written consent is required before contacting a beneficiary, and as of the Contract Year 2026 rules, even manual dialing needs it.
• All sales, marketing and enrollment calls must be recorded in their entirety, inbound and outbound, and this applies to TPMOs, not only to plan sponsors.
• The framework has been tightened every year since Contract Year 2023, so whatever is true today needs re-checking before launch.

Read this as a moat, not only as a cost. The compliance burden is exactly why the SERP has room in it: casual affiliate sites cannot operate here, and that is part of why competition index sits at 14 on a 301,000-volume term. But it means this property cannot be built the way the others are. It needs a compliance pass, and probably a partnership with a licensed agency that already carries the machinery, rather than Annette running lead capture herself.

The clean structure: do not capture leads at all. Publish genuinely useful Medicare content, and hand the traffic to one licensed Colorado agency under an arrangement where they own the consent, the recording and the disclaimer obligations. That keeps the regulatory weight on the party already carrying it.

The seasonality, which is severe

This category lives and dies in a ten-week window.

Annual enrollment runs October 15 to December 7. Everything has to be published, indexed and ranking by early September or it misses the entire year. That is the hard deadline this plan runs on, and today is August 10, so this season is almost certainly already gone. Plan for the 2027 season and use the intervening year to build authority.

The Colorado-versus-national question

medicare advantage colorado is 110 searches a month. medicare advantage plans is 301,000. The Colorado angle is not where the volume is.

But the Colorado angle is where the credibility is, and it is the only part Annette can genuinely own: which plans actually exist in your county, why the Western Slope and the Front Range differ, what altitude and rural provider networks mean for plan choice. National sites cannot write that. Build Colorado-deep, then let the national head terms be the stretch goal rather than the plan.

Note that colorado medicare supplement plans at 880 average with a 3,600 November peak and a $24.57 high bid is the best Colorado-specific target in the set.

What stays ruled out

• colorado senior property tax exemption (880 a month, $7.16 CPC). SERP-verified and it is a government wall: dpt.colorado.gov at 1 and 2, bouldercounty.gov at 3, four more county sites, plus a complete AI Overview. One of nine organic slots is non-government. Write it as a supporting page for the audience, never as a ranking target.
• Senior living placement. $3,500 to $12,000 per move-in and the door is shut. A Place for Mom and Caring.com have saturated it, and the discovery sweep found no Colorado senior-care keyword clearing 50 volume and a $3 CPC together.
• colorado long term care insurance (140 a month, competition index 58). Too crowded for the volume.

Build order

1. Find one licensed Colorado Medicare agency to partner with, and let them carry the TPMO obligations. This is the whole gate now, and it is a partnership conversation, not a price quote.
2. SERP-verify medicare advantage plans, medicare supplement plans and colorado medicare supplement plans. The 301,000-volume term at competition index 14 is the most valuable unchecked SERP anywhere in this work.
3. Register the domain and build.
4. Publish the Colorado-specific cluster first: plans by county, Front Range versus Western Slope networks, what changes at 65 here.
5. Publish and index by early September for the following year's enrollment period.
6. Layer in the broader retiree-finance content (is Colorado tax friendly, the property tax exemption explained, where to retire here) as supporting authority.
7. Hold indexing submission until Annette approves.

Kill criteria

• No licensed Colorado agency will partner, which would leave Annette carrying TPMO compliance alone. Do not do that.
• The three head-term SERP checks all come back as Medicare.gov plus carrier sites plus eHealth with no editorial room.
• One full enrollment season passes with traffic but no partner revenue.

Honest risks

• This is now the highest-ceiling property on the list and the most regulated. Those two facts are the same fact.
• YMYL content standards apply hard. Google holds Medicare content to a high expertise bar. Annette's medical-technologist framing from SmartStrongAlive is the right template: her own research and reporting, never advice, always pointing to Medicare.gov and SHIP.
• The 301,000 number will draw you toward the national build. Resist it. Competition index 14 on a term that size almost certainly reflects a SERP that Medicare.gov and the carriers own outright, and the report's whole lesson is that a low competition index means nothing until the result page is checked.
• One ten-week season a year means a mistake in timing costs twelve months, not one month.

Sources

• 2027 Maximum Broker Commissions for Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D, Ritter Insurance Marketing
• CY2027 Agent Broker Compensation memo, CMS via PSM Brokerage
• 2027 CMS Agent and Broker Compensation Rates Announced, PSM Brokerage
• Insurance Agents as TPMOs, what CMS compliance regulations mean for you, Ritter
• TPMO Disclaimer Requirements for Insurance Agents, PSM Brokerage
• 42 CFR Part 422 Subpart V, Medicare Advantage Communication Requirements
• CMS Medicare Marketing Compliance, Lead Generator Guide 2026
• Insurance Leads Cost Per Lead in 2026, real prices by type, InsureLeads
• Live Transfer Pricing in 2026, Plura AI
• Volume, CPC and bid data: DataForSEO kw_data_google_ads_search_volume (Google Ads endpoint, United States, English), pulled August 10, 2026

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Property 2: Colorado Wedding Venues

Status: BUILD. Upgraded from conditional on August 10, 2026: Annette established that Estes Park venues will pay $70 a month, which answers the one question the keyword data could not. Proposed domain: rockymountainweddingguide.com (available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026). coloradoweddingvenues.com, coloradoweddingguide.com and weddingsincolorado.com are all taken. Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, ranks 2, 3 and 9, and the "tested and disqualified" section Written: August 9, 2026

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The conflict, stated plainly

The source report reaches two opposite conclusions about this category, in two different sweeps, on the same day.

The first sweep ranked it as the best raw opportunity found. colorado wedding venues, 8,100 searches a month at difficulty 14 with a $3.44 CPC, "the only opportunity in the list with a genuine six-figure ceiling if it works." estes park wedding venues was SERP-verified content-winnable and called the best volume-to-difficulty ratio in the whole dataset that is also commercial.

The second sweep disqualified the entire family. Under "tested and disqualified": competition index 54 to 69 and CPC only $2.46 to $3.53, so "photographers and venues bid heavily but cheaply, so there is high competition AND low value. The precursor is not underpriced here, it is just crowded."

Both are correct, about different businesses:

• The second sweep was hunting advertising arbitrage: buy attention cheap, sell the click dear. On that test, weddings fail. A $3 CPC against competition index 65 is a crowded, cheap auction.
• The first sweep was pricing a directory and listings business. That model does not depend on CPC at all. It depends on whether a venue that sells one $15,100 booking will pay $100 a month to be seen. Competition index measures how many advertisers bid on a keyword; it says nothing about whether a venue owner will buy placement.

So the honest verdict is: the ad-value case is dead, the listings case is open, and the listings case has never been tested. Build this only as a listings business, and validate it by selling before writing.

Money model first, and it is the whole plan

The price is settled: $70 per venue per month (Annette, August 10, 2026). That replaces the report's generic $50 to $150 directory range and it changes this plan from a hypothesis into arithmetic.

What $70 a month actually buys

Target: $8,400 a year from Estes Park alone at ten venues, and $17,000 to $34,000 statewide at maturity. That is a real business built on a spreadsheet rather than on a CPC estimate, and it is the only property on the whole list whose revenue does not depend on ranking for a head term. Ten venues paying $70 does not care whether colorado wedding venues ever ranks.

The anchor that makes $70 easy to say yes to: The Knot ranks on the estes park wedding venues SERP showing Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch pricing from $15,100. One booking pays for eighteen years of listing. A venue does not need to think hard about $70.

The remaining unknown is the count, not the price

Willingness and price are now answered. What is not answered is how many Estes Park venues exist and how many will actually sign. Estes Park is a small town with a concentrated wedding economy, so the realistic ceiling there is likely 10 to 20 venues, not 50.

First task: count them. Build the list of every Estes Park wedding venue with a website, then work it. Ten signatures at $70 is the proof point that justifies the statewide build.

Keyword targets

Why estes park wedding venues is the entry point

Page one has three venues in the local pack, then organic is visitestespark.com, Black Canyon Inn, and then katiefletcherphoto.com at organic position 3, which is a solo wedding photographer's blog post. If a photographer's blog holds position 3, a properly built comparison page holds position 1 or 2.

The related searches are cost, prices, on a budget. Nobody on page one publishes a full price comparison. That is precisely the gap tasteboulder filled with 382 scraped menus, and Annette has already built that muscle once.

colorado elopement packages at difficulty 4 on 1,000 transactional searches is the cheapest possible test of whether the thesis works before committing to the 8,100 pillar.

Build order

1. Count the Estes Park venues and build the outreach list. Name, website, capacity, published starting price, contact.
2. Register the domain. Stand up Astro plus Cloudflare Pages plus D1, validate.config.json at creation.
3. Collect the price data. This is the real work and it is a data project, not a writing project: venue, capacity, season, what the starting price actually includes, what it excludes. Scrape where published, call where not.
4. Ship /estes-park-wedding-venues/ as a full price comparison, every column visible at desktop width, no hidden columns.
5. Ship /colorado-elopement-packages/ as the difficulty-4 test.
6. SERP-verify colorado wedding venues before building the statewide pillar.
7. Ship the pillar plus per-region clusters only if the pillar SERP clears.
8. Hold indexing submission until Annette approves.

The competitive reality, stated without flinching

The statewide term means competing with The Knot, WeddingWire and Zola. Those are venture-funded marketplaces with venue relationships, review inventory and decades of links. Difficulty 14 does not describe that fight honestly.

What they do not do is publish a clean, current, honest price comparison, because their revenue comes from the venues themselves and honest pricing hurts the venues. That conflict of interest is the only durable wedge here, and it is also the reason venues might not want to be listed. Both things are true at once and the phone calls will tell you which one wins.

Kill criteria

• Fewer than five Estes Park venues sign at $70 within 60 days of the page going live.
• The colorado wedding venues SERP check shows The Knot, WeddingWire and Zola holding six or more organic slots.
• Six months after the Estes Park page ships, it is not on page one for a difficulty-6 keyword.

Honest risks

• Listings are the only model, by design. The ad value in this category genuinely is low, so if venues stop renewing there is no fallback line. The upside of that constraint is that the revenue is visible and countable from month one instead of depending on a ranking.
• Wedding content has no evergreen advantage and heavy seasonality. Venues change pricing yearly and the research season runs roughly October through March for the following summer.
• This is a full property, not a page. The report is explicit: it takes the longest and needs the most pages of anything on the list.
• It is completely outside Annette's existing topical footprint. Nothing in the Boulder portfolio, SmartStrongAlive, or her SEO work feeds this. It starts from zero authority in a category owned by three national marketplaces.

Boundary with the Estes Park property

estes park wedding venues should belong to this property, and the Estes Park lodging property should own the "where your wedding guests stay" page that hangs off it. Set this in writing before either site publishes a word, so the two sites never compete on the same query.

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Property 3: Colorado Homeowner Guide

Status: RECOMMENDED. Build this one first of the new properties. Proposed domain: coloradohomeownerguide.com or owningincolorado.com (both available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026) Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, rank 4 and rank 14 in the first sweep, ranks 1, 2 and 4 in the SERP-verified arbitrage list Written: August 9, 2026

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The one-sentence case

This is the only new property where a keyword was verified against a live result page, found genuinely open, and priced at real advertiser money: colorado hoa laws at difficulty 1 with seven of ten organic slots held by ordinary content pages and a $7.45 cost per click.

Everything else on the new-property list is a hypothesis. This one has been checked.

Why it is one property and not four

The source report identified HOA law, solar incentives, xeriscaping and homebuying costs as separate opportunities that each fail to fit any Boulder charter. Individually none of them justifies a domain. The HOA cluster is roughly 400 to 600 searches a month total. Solar incentives is 260. Xeriscape is 110.

Together they are one coherent audience with one question: I own a house in Colorado and something about it is confusing or expensive. That is a property.

Money model first

Target revenue: $8,000 to $25,000 a year at maturity. The report models solar alone at $4,800 to $18,000 and xeriscape at $1,000 to $3,000. The HOA and closing-costs lines are real advertiser money with no published referral benchmark behind them, so they are upside, not plan.

The relationships to build, in order

1. A Colorado solar installer. Highest per-lead value in the entire sweep. Ask for $150 exclusive per qualified quote request. Namaste Solar already ranks on the colorado solar incentives SERP, so they know the channel.
2. A landscaper doing xeriscape and irrigation conversions. Seasonal, so sign in January for the March and April spike.
3. An HOA and community association attorney or a property management firm. Robinson and Henry, FirstService Residential and J. Baker Law Group are already doing content marketing on this exact SERP, which means they value the traffic. Sell them placement rather than leads.

Do not write the money pages until at least one of these is signed.

Keyword clusters

Cluster 1: HOA and homeowner law (the verified core)

Value hoa colorado at roughly $5, not $14. The reported CPC sits above the highest top-of-page bid, which cannot be literally true. Across this whole sweep, treat CPC as an upper bound and high_top_of_page_bid as the sober valuation.

Page one for colorado hoa laws is dre.colorado.gov at 1 and 6, then a law firm blog, an HOA management company guide, another law firm blog, Nolo, a SaaS content marketing page, Lexis and a trade association blog. Only two government results, no Maps pack, no portal wall. The AI Overview cites those content pages rather than replacing them.

The mechanic: the state HOA Center answers the procedural half and stops. The interpretive half, can they actually fine me for this, has been left to law firms and management companies. That is the gap.

Build one page targeting both head terms. They are the same family.

Cluster 2: Solar and energy

$17.64 is the highest verified CPC on any Colorado keyword that is not a Maps 3-pack. Volume is the constraint, not competition. Build it as a cluster, not a page: incentives, real installed cost, is it worth it here, Xcel net metering, how the federal credit interacts with the state programs.

Discount the traffic for AI Overview click suppression. The Overview answers the question above the fold.

Cluster 3: Landscape and water-wise

Small but real. A $5.73 CPC on a design query means Colorado landscapers are bidding hard. The 880 average on the seasonal terms describes no actual month, so plan publication for February so the pages are indexed before the March spike.

Cluster 4: Buying and owning costs

colorado closing costs is the textbook case. homes for sale boulder belongs to Zillow forever. What will I actually pay at closing is the question two weeks earlier, it carries mortgage and title money, and two of the nine page-one results are tiny local realtor blogs.

Charter note: the report assigns colorado closing costs to newtoboulder.com with a Boulder County framing, because the state head term is winnable by anyone but newtoboulder has a legitimate on-charter angle. Both can exist: this property takes the state term, newtoboulder takes what closing actually costs in Boulder County. Cross-link them and do not let them compete on the same query.

What NOT to build here, and why it matters

• radon testing colorado ($9.27 CPC, difficulty 22). Verified live: CDPHE at positions 1 and 4, a Maps pack of three contractors, then UCHealth, CU Anschutz and four county sites. Six of eleven organic results are government or university. Do not build it. Radon can be a paragraph inside the closing-costs and inspection content, never a target page.
• The whole insurance family. colorado home insurance is a $181.27 CPC at competition index 67. Carriers bid on the research queries too, so there is no precursor gap. This is directly relevant because newtoboulder already has a /wildfire-insurance/ page targeting 20 searches a month at competition index 78, which is wrong on both axes.
• Any procedural government question. Vehicle registration cost looked like the strongest find in the entire sweep on the numbers, then verified as a wall of dmv.colorado.gov and four county sites under a complete AI Overview. The fast sort: procedural questions belong to government sites and cannot be taken. Interpretive questions are open.
• Local home services generally. residential electrician denver scores difficulty 1 and page one is a Maps pack plus contractor homepages plus Yelp and Thumbtack. Difficulty scores are inverted on these SERPs because they read the thin backlink profiles of small contractor sites.

Build order

1. Sign one revenue partner (solar first, it pays best).
2. Register the domain, stand up Astro plus Cloudflare Pages plus D1, write validate.config.json.
3. Ship the HOA pillar page targeting both colorado hoa laws and hoa colorado. This is the verified opportunity and the fastest proof.
4. Ship the solar cluster, four to five pages.
5. Ship colorado closing costs.
6. SERP-verify denver property tax and colorado property tax. At 4,400 searches each with competition index 2 and 4, this is the biggest volume in the plan. If it clears, it becomes the second pillar.
7. Xeriscape cluster, published by mid-February.
8. Do not submit to Google Search Console or IndexNow until Annette says it is good enough to be indexed.

Kill criteria

• The HOA page does not reach page one within six months despite a difficulty-1 keyword. That would mean the property has an authority problem no keyword choice can fix.
• No solar installer, landscaper or law firm will pay for placement after ten conversations.
• denver property tax and colorado property tax both fail the SERP check, which would cap this property at roughly 800 searches a month total across every cluster. At that ceiling it is a lead-gen microsite, not a content business, and it should be judged on partner revenue only.

Honest risks

• The addressable volume is small. Add every verified keyword in this plan and it is under 1,000 searches a month before the property tax cluster. The case rests entirely on money per visitor, not traffic. If the partner relationships do not materialize, there is no fallback revenue line, because display at this volume is worthless.
• AI Overviews cap two of the four clusters. Solar and property tax both trigger them.
• She has no homeowner-law credibility. The pages that rank here are law firms and management companies. Hers has to win on being clearer and more current, and it has to be scrupulously careful not to read as legal advice.

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Property 4: New To Colorado Springs

Status: RECOMMENDED. Build second, after the homeowner property proves the model. Proposed domain: newtocoloradosprings.com (available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026) Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, ranks 5, 6 and 12 Written: August 9, 2026

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The one-sentence case

Colorado Springs is the same relocation play newtoboulder.com already runs, in a market where advertisers pay six times more per click, and Annette owns nothing there.

moving to colorado springs is 480 searches a month at difficulty 6 with a $9.85 cost per click. The Boulder equivalent, moving to boulder colorado, is 20 searches a month. That is the whole argument: the Boulder relocation long tail is 10 to 20 searches a month per town, and Colorado Springs is a real market with real advertiser money behind it.

Money model first

This is the rule the source report is built on: do not write a neighborhood page until the revenue relationship exists. Every neighborhood guide on newtoboulder is currently a page with no revenue attached to it.

Target revenue: $5,000 to $15,000 a year, on the report's model of one or two closed referrals a year plus a small moving-lead line. One closed referral pays for the whole property several times over.

The referral relationship, concretely

1. Identify three to five Colorado Springs buyer's agents with a real online presence and a track record with relocating buyers. Military and Space Force relocation is a huge slice of that market and worth screening for.
2. Sign a written referral agreement at 25% of the receiving agent's gross commission. That is the standard rate; the common range is 20 to 35% (The Close, Placester, HousingWire, Luxury Presence, all 2026).
3. Confirm Annette holds or can hold whatever license or referral arrangement Colorado requires to be paid a referral fee. This is the blocking legal question and it must be answered before any content is written. Referral fees to unlicensed persons are restricted in most states. An LLC-to-brokerage referral agreement, or partnering through a licensed referral network, may be the structure.
4. Only after that is signed: build the pages.

Keyword targets

cost of living colorado springs is a trap on its own terms: 1,900 searches at difficulty 11 looks like a win and earns about $50 a month on display. Its only real job is to be the internal-link feeder into moving to colorado springs at $9.85.

Gate: SERP verification before any build

Not one of these keywords was verified against a live result page. Difficulty 6 with a LOW competition index of 21 and a $9.85 CPC is an unusual combination that usually means an informational SERP with commercial advertisers stacked on top, which would be good news. It could also mean a portal wall.

Pull live SERPs for all four head terms before spending a dollar. The three gates each has to clear:

1. Money. Is the CPC high relative to competition index, with a real low-to-high bid range underneath it? A CPC with no bid range is Google guessing.
2. Editorial room. Does page one contain at least two or three ordinary content pages? A government wall, a Maps 3-pack, a portal wall, or an AI Overview that fully answers the question all mean no.
3. Precursor position. Is this the question asked before the spend, not during it?

Expect the Gunbarrel pattern on the neighborhoods terms: Wikipedia, realtor guides, Zillow, Niche. That pattern is enterable. boulder colorado neighborhoods has a four-year-old realtor PDF at position 2 and a moving company's blog post at position 6.

Page architecture

Phase 1, the money pages (build only after the referral agreement is signed):

• /moving-to-colorado-springs/, the pillar. What it actually costs, what surprises people, the military and Space Force angle, the timeline.
• /neighborhoods/, the hub, then one page per neighborhood, following the Gunbarrel template already built on newtoboulder.
• /cost-of-living/, feeder page, internally linked hard into the two above.
• /moving-companies/, only if the Colorado Springs movers SERP checks out. In Boulder that exact query is competition index 98 with a Maps pack, which is unwinnable. Do not assume the Springs is different. Check it.

Phase 2: neighborhood pages at a rate of two a week, each one internally linked to the referral CTA.

Phase 3: the buying-costs cluster (closing costs, property tax, what the assessor does), which pulls mortgage and title advertiser money.

Build spec

Same stack as her other sites: static Astro, Cloudflare Pages, one Cloudflare D1 database, validate.config.json at creation, no sticky elements, full-bleed sections with a centered container, zero horizontal overflow at 320 / 390 / 768 / 1280 / 1920 / 2560.

Costs: domain roughly $10 a year at Cloudflare Registrar, hosting free, DataForSEO calls for the SERP gate maybe $2. The real cost is time.

Kill criteria

Stop and do not build if any of these turn out true:

• The SERP check shows a portal wall (Zillow, Redfin, Niche, U.S. News) on three or more of the four head terms.
• No Colorado Springs agent will sign a written referral agreement inside 30 days.
• The legal question about receiving referral fees in Colorado has no clean answer.
• Twelve months after launch, zero referral conversations have come through the site. At that point the pages become an SEO-services demonstration asset for seobeliever.com and nothing more, which is a real but much smaller return.

Honest risks

• Nothing here is SERP verified. Four keywords, four unverified assumptions. This plan is a hypothesis until that check runs.
• She has no Colorado Springs knowledge. newtoboulder works partly because she lives there. A relocation guide written from 100 miles away by someone who has not walked the neighborhoods is exactly the thin content Google's helpful-content system targets. Either she spends real time there, or the site has to be built on verifiable data (prices, school data, commute times, HOA and metro district records) rather than impressions.
• Splitting attention. The report's closing warning applies: adding properties while the existing ones are thin makes the same mistake twice. This should not start until the newtoboulder moving-company page ships and the Boulder referral relationship exists.

Relationship to what she already owns

Zero overlap with the five Boulder sites. Colorado Springs is 100 miles away and outside every charter in BOULDER-TOPIC-BOUNDARIES.md. Nothing here needs a charter amendment.

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Property 5: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park

Status: CONDITIONAL. Biggest prize in the sweep, and the single most likely number to fall apart on inspection. Gate it hard. Proposed domain: estesparkstays.com or newtoestespark.com or staynearrmnp.com (all available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026). estesparkstays.com is the best fit because the money is lodging. Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, ranks 7 and 8 Written: August 9, 2026

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The one-sentence case

estes park hotels is 33,100 searches a month at a reported difficulty of 12 with a $3.60 cost per click, which is by a wide margin the largest commercial volume anywhere in the Colorado sweep, and difficulty 12 on a 33,100-volume OTA term is exactly the kind of score that falls apart when you actually look at the result page.

So this plan is really two things: a hard gate, and a build that only happens if the gate passes.

THE GATE, before anything else

Pull a live SERP for estes park hotels and estes park lodging before registering a domain.

Expected occupants: Booking.com, Expedia, Tripadvisor, Google Hotels, and a Google Hotels module that eats the top of the page. Competition index on estes park lodging is 96, which means heavy advertiser presence.

Pass condition: at least two or three ordinary content pages hold page-one organic slots, and the hotel-booking module does not push organic below the fold.

If the gate fails, this whole property collapses to the wedding plan's Estes Park cluster and the things-to-do authority pages, which are not worth a domain on their own. That is a realistic outcome and it should not be treated as a surprise.

Money model first

The affiliate-versus-display comparison is the clearest number in the whole report. At position 6 on 33,100 searches, roughly 1,600 visits a month:

• Display at $25 RPM: $40 a month.
• Affiliate at 2% booking rate, $600 average stay, 4% commission: $768 a month, $9,200 a year.

Same traffic. Twenty times the revenue. Build for affiliate and treat display as a rounding error.

Target revenue: $10,000 to $35,000 a year if the lodging cluster ranks, per the report, with a much more likely early figure of $4,000 to $12,000 from estes park lodging and the cabin and vacation-rental terms while the head term is still out of reach.

Set up before writing

1. Apply to Booking.com's affiliate partner program and to Expedia's, and get the actual published commission split in writing rather than working from the 3 to 6% estimate.
2. Evaluate Stay22 as the aggregation layer. It handles the link routing across multiple OTAs and pays on the same booking.
3. Approach five to ten independent Estes Park cabin and inn operators about a paid featured listing. Independents are the ones the OTAs squeeze hardest and are the most likely to pay for direct bookings.

Keyword clusters

The lodging cluster, which is the entire business case

Combined that is roughly 59,000 searches a month of accommodation intent. Nothing else in the Colorado sweep is within an order of magnitude.

The authority cluster, built for links and internal routing, never for revenue

Build these. Build them well. Understand exactly what they are for: topical authority and internal links into the lodging pages. The report is blunt about this and it is worth repeating, because huge volume with no advertiser money is the most seductive trap in local content.

The wedding overlap

estes park wedding venues (2,400 a month, difficulty 6, $2.46 CPC) is SERP-verified content-winnable and it is the best volume-to-difficulty ratio in the entire dataset that is also commercial. It appears in both this plan and the wedding property plan.

Decision required: it belongs to one property, not both. Recommendation: give it to the wedding property, because the venue-listings business model needs the statewide pillar behind it, and have this property own the "where your guests stay" lodging page that hangs off it. Cross-link and set the boundary in writing before either site publishes.

Alternative: extend outdoorboulder.com instead

The report flags this honestly. estes park lodging could be argued as an extension of outdoorboulder.com rather than a new domain. The Boulder topic charter does not cover Estes Park, so this is a decision, not a rule.

Recommendation: separate domain. Estes Park is a national-park gateway tourism economy with a different audience, different advertisers and different competitors from a Boulder outdoors site. Folding 59,000 monthly searches of hotel intent into outdoorboulder would blur that site's topic at exactly the moment it needs to be sharper. But the argument for extending is real, it costs nothing, and it inherits whatever authority outdoorboulder already has, so it deserves a proper decision rather than a default.

Build order

1. Run the SERP gate. Do not skip this and do not build on the difficulty 12 number.
2. Get the Booking.com or Stay22 commission terms in writing.
3. Register the domain, stand up Astro plus Cloudflare Pages plus D1.
4. Ship the lodging comparison pages first, aimed at estes park cabins and estes park lodging rather than the head term. Those are the realistic entries.
5. Ship the RMNP practical cluster (timed entry, when to go, where to park) for authority.
6. Only then attack estes park hotels.
7. Hold indexing submission until Annette approves.

The competitive reality

visitestespark.com is the destination marketing organization and holds the informational SERPs by right. Booking.com, Expedia and Tripadvisor hold the transactional ones by inventory. The gap, if there is one, is the same gap tasteboulder exploited with 382 scraped menu prices: nobody publishes an honest, current, side-by-side price comparison written by someone with no inventory to sell. That is the only defensible angle here, and it is a data-collection project before it is a writing project.

Kill criteria

• The SERP gate fails on both estes park hotels and estes park lodging.
• Booking.com's actual publisher commission comes in materially below 3% of booking value, which would break the affiliate math that justifies the whole build.
• Twelve months in, no lodging page has cracked page one for any term over 1,000 searches a month.

Honest risks

• Difficulty 12 at 33,100 volume is not credible on its face. Treat the headline number as unproven until a live SERP says otherwise.
• The affiliate commission range is unverified. Every revenue figure in this plan sits on top of a "roughly 3 to 6%" that had no first-party source behind it.
• Seasonality. Estes Park is a summer and early-fall economy. Expect the traffic and the revenue to arrive in a four-month window, and plan the publishing calendar to be indexed by April.
• This is the largest build on the whole list. A lodging comparison site needs real inventory data, refreshed. It is not a fifteen-page project.

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Property 6: Northern Colorado (Fort Collins)

Status: DO NOT BUILD AS A STANDALONE PROPERTY. Written because it appeared on the recommended list, and the honest recommendation is to fold it in or skip it. Proposed domain: newtofortcollins.com or northerncoloradoguide.com (both available via RDAP, checked August 9, 2026) Source: Where the Colorado Money Actually Is, rank 13 Written: August 9, 2026

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Why this plan says no

The source report ranks cost of living fort collins at 13 of 15 and its own verdict is: "NEW PROPERTY (Northern Colorado) or skip... Marginal. Listed for completeness because difficulty 6 at 720 volume is genuinely easy, but it fails the CPC test and it is not hers. Do not build this in isolation."

The numbers:

$1.96 is below the report's own $3 CPC filter. A property whose head term earns $300 to $900 a year is not a property, it is a page.

The two things worth doing instead

Option A, the recommended one: fold Fort Collins into Colorado Springs

If the Colorado Springs relocation property gets built and works, the same site can take Fort Collins as a second city under a broader "moving to Colorado" umbrella rather than a Springs-only brand. That argues for naming that property something city-neutral if this expansion is likely, which is a decision to make before registering newtocoloradosprings.com.

The domain question, decided now rather than later:

• newtocoloradosprings.com is the sharper brand and matches her existing newtoboulder naming pattern.
• A neutral name (something like a Colorado relocation brand) allows Springs, Fort Collins, Grand Junction and Durango under one roof and one authority profile.

Recommendation: neutral name, city sections. The Boulder portfolio's lesson is that per-city domains fragment authority across markets that are individually too small, and Fort Collins is the proof: 720 searches a month on its best term.

Option B: give fort collins vs boulder to newtoboulder.com

fort collins vs boulder returns 140 searches a month, which is real data. Compare that with what newtoboulder currently targets:

• boulder vs longmont, no data at all. Not zero volume, no record.
• boulder vs louisville, no data at all.
• boulder vs denver, 390 a month, LOW competition, no CPC.

Those two existing comparison pages target queries nobody searches. The city-versus-city format works; she picked the two variants with no demand. The fix costs nothing and needs no new domain: retarget them at boulder vs denver (390) and fort collins vs boulder (140), or fold both into a single multi-city comparison page. That is on-charter for newtoboulder and it is the highest-return action anywhere in this plan.

If she builds it anyway

Should Annette decide Northern Colorado is worth a property regardless, the money model is the same as Colorado Springs and the same rule applies: the real estate referral relationship comes before the content, at roughly 25% of the receiving agent's gross commission. Fort Collins median values sit between Boulder's and Colorado Springs', so model somewhere near $3,000 to $4,000 per closed referral.

Clusters worth verifying first, none of them SERP-checked:

• cost of living fort collins (720, difficulty 6, $1.96)
• moving to fort collins, not measured in the sweep, price it before anything else
• fort collins neighborhoods, not measured, price it
• Colorado State University parent and student relocation, which is a genuine annual demand cycle and was not tested at all

If moving to fort collins prices anything like moving to colorado springs ($9.85 CPC at difficulty 6), this plan changes completely. That single unmeasured keyword is the deciding fact and it costs one API call.

Kill criteria

Already met, on the current data. The only thing that reopens it is moving to fort collins pricing above $5 CPC with editorial room on the SERP.

Honest summary

This is on the list because the report listed it for completeness, and completeness is not the same as a recommendation. Two of three sensible actions here do not involve a new domain at all. The third depends on one keyword nobody has priced yet.