Gallatin County has out-permitted every other large county in Montana for a decade running, and its home prices have gone up anyway. That single fact should reshape how anyone thinks about buying land in Three Forks this year, because the town most people treat as the affordable release valve for the Gallatin Valley is running the same math as everywhere else in it. Building more hasn't made land cheaper. It has mostly kept the shortage from getting worse.
That's the backdrop. The more immediate issue, if you're the one signing a purchase agreement on a lot this fall, is that Three Forks is in the middle of rewriting its entire zoning code, chapter by chapter, with hearings still on the calendar into October. The rules you're reading today on a plat map or a listing sheet are not guaranteed to be the rules in place when you pull a building permit.
The Permits Went Up. So Did Everything Else.
A Montana Free Press analysis published in August 2026 found that no large county in the state has permitted new housing at a rate approaching Gallatin County over either of the past two five-year stretches. The county averaged roughly 15 permitted housing units per 1,000 residents annually from 2016 through 2020, and that rate ticked up slightly, to about 15.7, from 2021 through 2025. Both were the highest rates in Montana for their respective periods. Gallatin County has also carried the state's highest median home price through both of those same windows.
Put those two facts next to each other and the usual argument about supply and affordability stops working the way people expect. More building here has correlated with higher prices, not lower ones, because the pace of people moving into the valley has outrun even a record pace of construction. For a town like Three Forks, sitting 33 miles west of Bozeman and marketed for years as the place where your money still buys land, this matters directly. It means the county-wide demand pressure that keeps Bozeman expensive doesn't stop at the Three Forks city limit. It just arrives with a lower price tag attached, for now.
The town's own history backs this up. A 2022 housing study from Future West and the One Valley Community Foundation told the Three Forks City Council that the area would need somewhere between 94 and 217 new homes by 2026 to keep pace with regional job growth. The study's planning consultant, Randy Carpenter, put the underlying problem in blunt terms at the time.
"I would argue from an affordability standpoint that Three Forks zoning code is too restrictive. We make it harder to build cheaper housing, the more affordable housing."
Broadwater County's sheriff at the time, Wynn Meehan, told the Three Forks Voice that his own department couldn't find affordable housing for deputies working the area, and that he'd discussed building workforce housing near the Interstate 90 and U.S. Highway 287 interchange so people who work locally could actually afford to live there. That conversation stalled for a while. It didn't disappear. It became the zoning rewrite now underway.
The Rulebook Is Still Being Written While You're Reading It
The Three Forks Zoning and Planning Board has spent much of 2026 working through the city's zoning chapters one at a time, alongside a contracted planner and city staff, adding extra meeting dates beyond its usual third-Thursday schedule to get through the work. Drafts of each chapter are posted publicly as they're completed. As of late September, the board still had a second reading pending on multiple Title 11 sections, including the chapter governing vested rights and how the city treats lots, uses, and structures that don't conform to the new rules once they take effect.
As of the city's most recent public notice, the second reading of those Title 11 chapters is listed as still to be scheduled, with the city warning that the chapter numbering itself will keep shifting until every section is adopted. None of this is unusual for a small city updating a decades-old code. What is unusual, if you're a buyer, is the timing: you could sign a purchase agreement on raw land in Three Forks this month and close during a period when the zoning designation, setback rules, or permitted uses attached to that parcel are actively being redrafted, without a fixed date for when the new version takes effect.
That's a real planning variable, not a hypothetical one. If your project depends on a conditional use permit, a variance, or a specific density allowance, the version of the code your architect is working from in September may not be the version your building permit gets reviewed against in the spring. Anyone buying with development intent should be asking the city's zoning official, Kelly Smith, exactly which chapters affecting their parcel are still open for revision before they finalize a site plan.
What "No Zoning" Actually Means Once the Lot Is Yours
Three Forks land listings split cleanly into two categories, and the difference between them is bigger than the price per acre suggests. Parcels inside the city limits come with mandatory infrastructure. City ordinance requires that any building producing wastewater connect to the municipal sewer system, and it bans septic tanks outright except in the narrow case where the City Engineer, the Water/Wastewater Operator, and the County Sanitarian all approve one in writing because public sewer isn't available. New construction connecting to city water or sewer is billed impact fees, due at the time the zoning permit is issued, on top of standard connection charges.
Parcels outside the city limits are frequently marketed on the opposite premise: no zoning, no covenants, no restrictions on what you build or how. One listing for a 13.9-acre property adjacent to the Three Forks Airport advertises exactly that freedom. What that framing leaves out is that "no zoning" also means no municipal water or sewer. You're drilling a well and permitting a septic system through the county, at your own cost and on your own timeline, and if the parcel sits under the airport's influence area, you're checking Gallatin County Airport Board regulations on top of whatever county rules already apply.
| Inside city limits | Outside city limits | |
|---|---|---|
| Water and sewer | Connection to municipal system required by ordinance | Well and septic, permitted through the county |
| Zoning oversight | Governed by the city's zoning code, currently under revision | Often no zoning designation at all |
| Upfront cost signal | Lower per-acre price, plus impact fees at permit issuance | Higher perceived freedom, plus well and septic development costs |
Neither column is the better deal in the abstract. The point is that the acre-for-acre comparison buyers usually make between in-town and county land skips the part that actually determines your build cost, and that part doesn't show up on a listing sheet.
A Thin Market Rewards Patience Over Headlines
Three Forks closed on 40 homes in 2022, 35 in 2023, 24 in 2024, and 28 in 2025. Those aren't large enough numbers to support the kind of quarter-over-quarter percentage swings that sometimes get quoted about this market. When ten sales can move a median by tens of thousands of dollars, a single strong or weak quarter tells you less about the town than it looks like it does. The more durable signals are the structural ones: MLS data for the Gallatin Valley showed Three Forks leaning into a buyer's market in July 2026, based on months of supply of inventory, even as the median sale price for that same month increased. Sellers were getting close to 90% of list price over the prior three months, and the gap between the two facts, more inventory relative to sales pace but prices still climbing, is the same county-wide pattern showing up at the neighborhood level.
For a buyer with development intent, that combination is worth sitting with rather than reacting to. A buyer's market gives you room to negotiate on price and terms. A zoning code in the middle of a rewrite gives you a reason to build extra time into your due diligence period rather than rushing to close before you understand which chapter of Title 11 applies to your parcel. Neither condition is bad news. Both reward buyers who ask more specific questions before they sign than the listing sheet answers.
If you're evaluating a parcel in Three Forks for a build, a subdivision, or an investment hold, the conversation worth having isn't about the median price. It's about which side of the city line your lot sits on, what utilities that requires, and which zoning chapters covering your specific parcel are still open for revision this fall. Bozeman Realty works land and development deals across the Gallatin Valley, including Three Forks, and can walk through what a specific parcel's zoning status actually means before you're under contract.
