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Montana Commercial Real Estate

UNDER ALL IS LAND

A WHITE PAPER ON THE HELENA MARKET

UNDER ALL IS LAND

A WHITE PAPER ON THE HELENA MARKET

UNDER ALL IS LAND

Under all is Land, Helena MT

Growth, Constraint, and Where Value Moves Next in the Helena Metropolitan Statistical Area

Lewis and Clark · Jefferson · Broadwater Counties

Helena is building more than it has in a generation, into an economy that added no net jobs last year. Both of those statements are true at the same time, and holding them together is the entire job of underwriting this market in 2026.

The three-county Helena Metropolitan Statistical Area — Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, and Broadwater — reached an estimated 97,153 residents as of July 1, 2025, up 8.2% since the 2020 Census. Over roughly that same window, the region passed a $283 million school bond, delivered or financed roughly 600 new apartment units, opened a $107 million museum, and pushed $34.2 million of commercial construction value through the City of Helena permit desk in the first six months of 2026 alone.

Meanwhile, Helena MSA payroll employment in June 2026 was 45,700 — precisely what it was in June 2025, and still below the June 2024 peak of 46,000. The University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research described the state economy this year as “no-hire, no-fire.” That gap between construction activity and job growth is not a contradiction. It is a timing problem. Timing problems are where money gets made and lost, and they are the reason this paper exists.

FIVE THINGS TO TAKE FROM THIS PAPER

  1. The demand base is deeper and wealthier than Helena gets credit for. Within a 15-minute drive of the city center there are 25,242 households, 44.8% of them earning $100,000 or more, and a daytime population of 67,500 against 57,375 residents. That net in-commute of roughly 10,000 people every day is a real, measurable retail and office demand driver.
  2. The employment base is unusually stable and unusually concentrated. Government, education, and health care together account for 46% of the 50,098 jobs across the three counties. Public administration alone is 28.8%. That combination produces a market that does not boom and does not crash — and that behaves very differently from Bozeman or Kalispell.
  3. Multifamily is oversupplied at the top and starved in the middle. Roughly 600 units delivered or financed since 2024 are almost all priced at the ceiling of what this market will bear. The $1,200–$1,400 workforce unit is what is actually missing, and current construction costs do not allow anyone to build it without subsidy.
  4. Class B is the strongest part of the office market, not Class A. New-condition Class A space is asking $36 per square foot gross with parking included and it is sitting. Average-to-good Class B is leasing at $18–$22 NNN — roughly the same effective cost to a tenant — and it is moving. State agencies, the market’s dominant tenant, are staying in the buildings they are already in.
  5. Everything eventually reduces to land — and land here is priced by regulation as much as by dirt. Water rights, sewer capacity, and a zoning code currently being rewritten will decide more about Helena land values over the next five years than any demographic trend in this report.
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