Copper Mountain real estate market report; the averages don’t tell the story
Copper Mountain condos are sitting on the market for increasingly long periods of time.
There currently are 92 homes of all types listed; from high end, ski in-ski out homes, to ski condos at the base of the mountain. Still, it is not as bad as 2001-2002 when I remember there being as many as 160 Copper condos for sale.
There have been only five sales so far this year, but four more are pending, awaiting closing sometime in the next month or so. Nine sales in the first six months of the year means that perhaps we will have 20-22 sales this year, assuming about 60% of the sales occur in the last half of the year. Unless sales pick up, we have enough inventory to last for more than four years, assuming no new listings will come on the market!
Copper Mountain real estate is an unusual market.
I am also a Copper homeowner, and I have sold real estate in Summit County for almost 16 years, so I have seen good times and bad. What is different about Copper is that the homeowners are not real estate speculators. They are avid skiers, and many own more than one condo. The reason they sell is to either buy a larger one or because their kids have grown up, their work schedule has got busy, and they just don’t get to use it any more. As a result, they are mostly not terribly motivated to sell and are unwilling to reduce prices more than they consider necessary. While we seem to be approaching 2006 prices in the rest of the county, we are not even close at Copper yet.
While preparing to write this blog post, I looked to see what the average sale to list price ratio was. I was surprised to see that it was 92%, very close to what it has been lately in the rest of the county. When I looked at the five sales, I realized that two of them sold for full price, unusual in this market! What made the difference was a large, four bedroom condo in Elk Run, that was listed at $1,150,000 and sold for $910,000, only 79% of list price! Apparently that owner didn’t fit the Copper mold, or perhaps he was unwilling to pay the large special assessment that is being levied in the complex.
The remaining two sales were a Tucker Mountain Lodge one bedroom/den, sold for 92% of list ($405,000) and a three bedroom Anaconda which sold for 90% of list or $450,000. They were pretty much “average” sales, but the two full price sales in Copper Valley (2 br for $349,900) and Timber Creek (3br for $375,000) balanced out the large discount on Elk Run. As a result, 92% was both the average and the median sale to list price ratio. It just goes to show that you can tweak numbers any way you want, especially if you are dealing with small quantities. If I wanted to put a positive spin on it, I could say that 40% of all sales at Copper Mountain sold for full price!
Click the link for general information on Copper Mountain condo complexes, and both the East and Center Villages.
The Copper Property Owners and Lessees website has HOA documents, minutes and financials for most of the complexes at Copper.
