Dwayne Romero, the Democratic nominee for Colorado's Third Congressional District, has a property management and real estate firm that recently sold an Aspen home for $24.5 million. Another went for $23.8 million. His company, the Romero Group, boasts over $50 million in real estate sales since 2023.
His campaign's tent-pole issue is housing affordability.
Romero — a 27-year real estate veteran, co-founder and CEO of the Romero Group — manages over 65 HOA communities and Metropolitan Districts across the Roaring Fork Valley. His firm owns significant resort and commercial real estate holdings, including the Snowmass Mall. This is not a man who stumbled into wealth. He built an empire in one of the most expensive zip codes in America.
And now he'd like to tell working families why they can't afford a house.
Romero's campaign messaging blames "Wall Street behemoths" for "buying up homes and driving up rents." That's a bold accusation from a man whose company specializes in selling luxury properties to the kind of buyers who make Aspen unaffordable for the doctors and lawyers who actually work there, let alone the teachers and firefighters. And who's records show he is heavily invested in BlackRock, Airbnb, and Blackstone, all 3 of which are corporations who buy up affordable homes for their businesses.
Romero's solution to the affordability crisis, per his campaign, starts with undoing the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the signature 2025 legislative package. So the plan is: sell tens of millions in luxury real estate, blame corporate investors for the housing crisis, then run for Congress to repeal the other party's economic legislation. That's not a housing platform. That's a business plan with a campaign website.
The Romero Group isn't some side hustle. It's a multi-dimensional real estate management, development, investment, and realty firm. Romero served on the Aspen City Council and the Aspen School District Board of Education. He was director of economic development under then-Governor John Hickenlooper. He's a former Army Ranger and Bronze Star recipient, which is genuinely commendable — and completely irrelevant to whether a man who profits from luxury real estate should be lecturing anyone about affordable housing.
Romero won the Democratic primary in June, beating fellow Aspenite Alex Kelloff, and will face Republican Jeff Hurd in the general election. He entered the race late, after Kelloff had been campaigning across the district for nearly a year. Apparently the affordability message was urgent enough to run on but not urgent enough to start on time.
The "Wall Street behemoths" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Romero isn't railing against faceless hedge funds from a modest ranch house in Pueblo. He's running the accusation from Aspen — a town where the median home price makes Wall Street look like a bargain bin. His own firm's sales range from $360,000 to $24.5 million. That top number is not a typo.