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……

According to House Bill 1091, recently enacted by the Legislature of the State of Colorado and signed into law by Governor Ritter, all residences sold, transferred or rented after July 1, 2009, must have carbon monoxide alarms if they have a fuel fired heater or appliance, a fireplace, or an attached garage. Our Listing agreement will state the requirements […]

Added to our credit woes are new requirements that appraisers fill out an additional form when submitting an appraisal for the purchase of a new Summit County home or condo. The form is called a Market Conditions Addendum, and on it, the appraiser must list the number of similar homes sold within the last 7-12 months, 4-6 months and 3 months. Then he or she must evaluate the length of time the properties are on the market, what the absorption rate is ( take the number of properties listed, divide by the number sold, and the result is how many months or years it will take to sell a home) and the median price of similar properties. If the property is a single family home, they just evaluate similar homes, but if it is a condominium, then the condo complex must also be analyzed.

Because our sales have decreased dramatically in the last six months, we now find ourselves in the situation……

Real estate in Summit County has slowed dramatically in the last six months. Of course, with the economy tanking as it did, real estate everywhere was negatively affected. While other areas are beginning to see some new life in their markets, we have yet to see an upturn in sales.

Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Dr Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for The National Association of Realtors. He had a graph that I found very interesting. It showed how prices of homes in LA and prices of homes in Denver over the last eight years were very different. In LA, there was a huge increase in prices, and consequently, a large bust in the last year or two. Denver, on the other hand, had much slower growth in average price and also a much smaller downturn. While we are not in Denver, and did have faster growth in prices, they were nothing like the prices in LA. Also, the average price in Summit County grew primarily from people buying larger and fancier homes, although we had decent appreciation on existing homes.

Those large Silverthorne, Frisco and Breckenridge homes are now the ones that are not selling, and they are having some serious price reductions. We actually saw…..

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…..