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This article was taken from the Daily Planet on February 8, 2006: |
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Author: |
Reilly Capps |
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Date: |
02/08/2006 |
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If there's a real estate bubble, it's not bursting yet, and it's not bursting in Telluride, where real estate sales set yet another record in 2005.
About $725 million in real estate changed hands last year, which is more than $100 million more than last year, or a jump of 17 percent, according to numbers compiled by Judi Kiernan of Telluride Consulting.
The number of transactions in the county increased from 855 to 884, an increase of 4 percent.
The number of sales in the county has been increasing at a rate of 4 percent a year for the past 20 years, and the total dollar volume has been going up at a rate of 14 percent over that time frame.
There were more transactions during the stock market boom years of 1999 and 2000, but those sales went for a lower dollar amount than 2005.
The number of sales in the Town of Telluride actually decreased last year by 24 percent, as more transactions took place in the county and in Mountain Village.
Prices for places to live in Telluride and Mountain Village reached new heights last year. The average price for a single-family home in Telluride was $1.49 million; in Mountain Village, the average price was $3.2 million, according to statistics compiled by the Telluride Association of Realtors.
For a condo in Telluride, the average price was $721,446; in Mountain Village, it was $908,679.
The median price for condos was far less than the average. The median condo in Telluride - meaning that half of the condos cost more and half cost less - cost $567,500. That number was about the same in Mountain Village. This means, essentially, that there were a number of very expensive condos that bumped up the average. One condo in Telluride sold for $3.4 million; one in Mountain Village for $2.7 million.
The most expensive house in Telluride sold for $4.4 million; in Mountain Village one sold for $8.3 million.
As much as homes and condos, though, it was vacant residential lots outside of Telluride and Mountain Village that sold at a brisk pace, with 160 vacant lots sold for a total of $106 million, according to Keirnan.
There were a huge number of transactions of vacant land near the outlying towns, according to TAR. In Ridgway/Ouray, the west end of the county, and south toward Dolores, buyers gobbled up vacant land.
In the Ridgway/Ouray area, 91 pieces of vacant land were sold; in the Placerville /Norwood/Nucla area, 46 were sold; towards Dolores 27 were sold. This likely has something to do with the cost of land in those areas. While the average price for a piece of vacant land was $1.2 million in Telluride and $1.5 in Mountain Village, parcels of land in Ridgway/Ouray averaged $216,718 and in Placerville/Norwood/Nucla they averaged $181,000, according to TAR.
The most expensive thing bought or sold in the area last year was a plot of land in Mountain Village that went for $25 million.
Rube Felicelli of the Telluride Real Estate Corporation said he saw some very eager buyers this year, including several who bought houses the first time they looked at them.
"I've never seen the kind of confidence in this market that I've seen in the last year," Felicelli said. "Overall the whole market has been very strong."
As Telluride becomes more and more built-out and vacant land becomes almost non-existent, that lack of supply drives prices up.
"We still have a small supply and there's a lot of pent-up demand," Felicelli said.
Buyers stymied by the lack of properties in town begin to look up in Mountain Village, which is building more and more condos to meet demand.
Vacant land in Mountain Village - especially land with ski-in/ski-out potential and along the golf courses - are selling well, Felicelli said.
Those that can't find a place in Telluride or Mountain Village often begin to look in the outlying areas, either on the mesas or in Norwood, Ridgway, Rico, or elsewhere.
"You just have to keep looking further and further out," said Todd Creel of Prospect Reality.
Property in Aldasoro Ranch and other nearby mesas sold very well.
"They look like a good deal, with a lot of value there," Creel said.
Both Felicelli and Creel said there's no reason to worry about a real estate bubble in Telluride, even as much of the country fears a price drop. There seems to be less speculating going on in the regional market.
"They are buying with the hope that it'll appreciate, but there's not this idea that I'm going to buy it and flip it in a year," Felicelli said.
Creel said that many buyers are looking to keep the property for a long time.
"People are buying it and keeping it," he said.
That brings a kind of stability to the market, Creel said, and reduces rampant speculation. |
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