April 27th, 2009
If you have a home for sale in Breckenridge, Frisco, Silverthorne, Copper Mountain, Dillon or Keystone, you need to do two things in order to get it sold in today’s market; price it right and make it look pretty! Simple things, but not always done properly.
Pricing today is like walking a tightrope. On the one hand you want a list price as low as you can in order to attract as many Buyers as possible. The lower the price, the bigger the Buyer pool. On the other hand, you need to leave yourself plenty of room to negotiate so that the Buyer will feel like he got a real deal. Better yet, a steal! I find that many Buyers will make an offer of 90% or less of the list price and if a Seller counters with a higher price, just walk away and try someone else. Those Buyers have absolutely no emotional connection to the home or condo at all. They simply want a deal. Sometimes they have to kiss a lot of toads before they find their prince, but they are willing to give it multiple tries and eventually they find one one that works.
Hearing that, a Seller’s first reaction is to want to price much higher……
April 3rd, 2009
The Summit County real estate news is grim, although March was less grim than February. Can we call it a silver lining? Probably not, because we were still down 49% from March of 2008! Considering that business in February was off by 77% with only 24 sales, having 47 sales in March looks pretty darn good! However, when you compare it to March of 2008, with 92 residential sales, and March 2007 when we had 121, there isn’t much cause for celebration. Compare First Quarter 2009 to Q1 2008 and we were off by a whopping 62%. Sales for the three months totalled 108. When you consider that we have 639 Realtors in the County, it is obvious that there are more than a few that are either living off savings or working other jobs.
April and May are normally very quiet, but June is when Buyers come into town. With the stock market appearing to be moving up, and real estate in other parts of the country bottoming out, we are hoping those Buyers will show up…..
March 25th, 2009
Summit County, and especially the towns of Breckenridge and Frisco, have traditionally been very expensive places to live. First time home buyers usually bought in Dillon or Silverthorne, where it was more affordable. In recent years prices climbed so high that even town planners started referring to their housing programs for locals as “attainable” rather than “affordable”.
The County and the towns recognized some time ago that we needed local’s housing here rather than having all our workers drive home to Leadville, Fairplay or Kremmling. Many local workers do that anyway, as generally the lower priced homes here in the county are fairly small condos and townhomes. Most are without garages and good storage. In order to keep the prices down, the planners required ……
March 1st, 2009
It is Saturday night, and flipping through TV channels I find a show I haven’t seen before about real estate bus tours of homes that are good deals. One show, set in Stockton, California, had some homes that were listed for sale at about 40% of their original sales prices. Their market must really be depressed as the prices of the homes were very reasonable and California is not known for affordable prices! The next episode, in Dallas, Texas, had homes with savings of $20,000 to $150,000 off original list price. It started me wondering which homes would qualify for such a tour if we were to have one in Summit County. Just the town of Frisco alone gave me enough to fill up this blog post. We can’t match the California prices, but I did a little searching and came up with a few similar to the Dallas savings, so here is your virtual bus tour….all aboard!
First on the list, a three bedroom condo in Frisco for less than $300,000. Originally listed last year at $385,000, this renovated condo with two……
November 11th, 2008
Wildernest gives you more for your money.
Condos and townhomes are available at reasonable prices. Wildernest is commonly thought of as being in Silverthorne, even though it is not in the town limits. It has a great location not far from I-70 and many of the complexes have fabulous lake and mountain views. It is about 15 minutes from Keystone, 20 minutes from Copper and 25-30 minutes from Breckenridge. Even Vail is only about 30 minutes away in good weather.
Buyers for condos in Wildernest consist of people wanting to pay a modest amount of money for a condo that is considered “rentable”, plus many locals and others wanting a weekend getaway. Because there are so many condo complexes, it often seems confusing to try to figure out which ones to look at. Here is a quick explanation of the condos that fit each of these three categories of Buyers.
Those wanting to rent their condo short term when they are not using it themselves need places with access to….
