Tom Ross/staff

03-03-2012

There was mixed news on the real estate front this week, with the $2.58 million sale of a five-bedroom home in The Porches of Steamboat but a softening of pending sales.

Stan Urban, of Land Title Guarantee Co., said Thursday that the local market came out of the holidays with some good momentum leading to $42.7 million in dollar volume in January (up 1.4 percent from January 2011). However, some of that momentum has fizzled as February turned into March, he said.

“January and February were really strong, and those are usually very slow months,” Urban said. “But things have slowed down a little. With interest rates low, I was expecting to see a lot more of that, but I’m just not seeing it come through right now.”

There was a noticeable uptick in closings of high-end properties early last week, but those closings represent contracts that typically are at least a month old, Urban said.

The spillover from late January and early February activity last week included six transactions of $700,000 or greater with a combined dollar total of almost $7 million.

The others include a 4,762-square-foot home in The Sanctuary that sold March 1 for $1.98 million. This was the first sale of the custom home, and even though the price was lofty, the fact that the 0.8-acre building lot sold for $470,000 in 2004 reveals that the structure itself sold for close to $1.5 million, depending upon how one would value the lot in 2012.

Next on the list was a 3,719-square-foot home in the rural Deerwood Estates neighborhood. The home, which previously had sold for $1.15 million, sold for $940,000, or $252 per square foot. A comparable sale in Tree Haus this week was the sale of a 3,056-square-foot home on a heavily treed lot for $898,000.

The other two sales include a Lake Catamount lot that sold for $800,000 and a 35-acre parcel off Colorado Highway 131 just north of the Yampa River bridge.

There also was an encouraging sign for the construction industry this week with the issuance of a building permit for a new home in The Sanctuary on Aspen Wood Drive just to the east of Rollingstone Ranch Golf Club. The permit value —not the same as retail value of the construction project — is $1.74 million.

The sale at The Porches represented the first developer sale of a whole-ownership unit in almost a year at the project just removed from the base of the ski area off Steamboat Boulevard, said Jon Kowalsky, of the sales staff at The Porches.

Kowalsky and colleague Carol Parish co-listed the 5,201-square-foot home. All of the residences in the first phases of The Porches are large duplexes.

Kowalsky said traffic at his high-end neighborhood has picked up this winter — there were two competing offers for the home that sold, and the second party is considering another Porches unit.

“We’ve seen a high level of interest, which is encouraging,” Kowalsky said.

He added that Parish also has a potential buyer who was interested in the latest sale, where the unit overlooks open space.

Parish said the traffic at The Porches has been building for a year, and people seem to be more serious. She takes it as a sign that in the lofty price range from $1.5 million to $2.5 million, there aren’t as many desirable properties as there were the past several years.

The Porches occupies a niche near the ski area, where it has a residential feel but also offers a full-service management company and quick shuttle service to the Gondola Transit Center.

Scott Wither, of Colorado Group Realty, who represented the buyer in The Porches sale, said his client looked at properties throughout the valley in that price range.

“She liked the floor plans at The Porches and the high-quality construction, but what really made the difference was the great management company there,” Wither said. “She can enjoy the pool and the workout room there, and it’s easier to have the high-end service if she wants it. If she doesn’t want to use it, she doesn’t have to.”

To reach Tom Ross, call 970-871-4205 or email tross@SteamboatToday.com