Breckenridge condominiums were slow sellers
the first five months of the year. Inventory levels are high, with 394 Breck condos for sale right now, but only 24 sales from 1/1/2009 to 5/28/2009. At that rate, it is going to take 6 1/2 years to sell them all! Condos make up about 45% of the total residential property for sale in Breckenridge, but so far this year, have only made up 26% of the total residential sales. Looking at the mix of what has sold, I noticed that of the 394 condos, 88 were priced over $1M, but only one has sold in that price range. However, of all 93 Breck residential sales for 2009 to date, 27 were listed at more than $1M. Most of the higher priced properties were single family homes.

Other parts of Summit County have seen only lower priced properties selling, but I think that Buyers are taking advantage of some very anxious high end Sellers of larger Breckenridge homes and getting them for some good prices. Getting a loan for more than $729,000 can be difficult these days, so cash buyers are in…..

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 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 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….

Still May, it is early season for hiking, but we are on our third week. This time last year there was no way we could hike as even the bike paths were still snow covered. I am part of a group of hikers who get together every Wednesday, starting as early as we can and going until snow stops us. This year our first hike was May 6th. We hiked about 6 miles on the bike path from Frisco to Copper Mountain. It is easy as hikes go; relatively flat with an elevation gain of about 600′. The Ten Mile Canyon is famous for avalanches in the spring, but we were going late enough that most had already happened. We did have to climb over one that had crossed the bike path and gone into the river, and we had some snow on the path as we got closer to Copper, but it was a good day for hiking . We had quick pit stop at the Starbucks and then took the Summit Stage back to Frisco.

May 13th we checked out the lower (easier) part of the Ptarmigan Trail…..

In our Summit County Buyer’s market, Buyers offer considerably less money than Sellers expect, and many Sellers get frustrated and insulted when they see the offer. It is often difficult to negotiate an agreement, but agreement is the goal of both Buyer and Seller, and it is important to keep it in mind.

Today, I suggest to Sellers that if they truly want to sell their properties, that they be open minded, creative and calm. Keeping emotion out of the negotiation is a difficult but important thing to do.

Seriously considering an offer that is $585,000 when you are asking $650,000 might be hard to do, but 90% of list price is not unusual these days. I have seen offers for even less. Many people assume that the Buyer wants to meet in the middle; in this case, to pay around $617,500. However, the Buyer often wants to be much closer to their offering price than that. Perhaps they have $598,000 in mind. The initial offer is a way of finding out the Seller’s motivation. If the Seller comes back with a counterproposal of $640,000, many Buyers assume

The Summit Daily News says that home values are up. They made us read the headline! What they really meant was that home valuations are up. Values and valuations are two different things, especially when it applies to property taxes. The County Assessor has just mailed the new valuations on all property in Summit County to the owners, and the numbers, in many instances, seem to be way off base. The time period the assessor is using, (1/1/2007 to 6/30/2008) to determine valuation was the last gasp of our Seller’s market when prices were increasing fairly quickly. However, I don’t know of any two year period where property values increased by 30-60%. Some of my clients who have contacted me for sales information for the period have huge increases. I can see it in instances where the property was undervalued, but there is no way that the statistics support many of the numbers the county has sent to homeowners.

For example, a half duplex in Frisco….