More Resort Homes For Sale, Prices Don’t Drop

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colorado (CBS4) - August 25 2008 - The numbers show mountain real estate sales are starting to slow down after a boom over the past two years when both real estate prices and transactions broke records.

Though real estate transactions are going down, prices are not. It seems the sellers are testing not only the market, but the buyers.

“We’ve had a lot of lookers,” said a home seller. “We’ve had a lot of offers that weren’t adequate and we’ve held our price steady.”

Most sellers are not planning to lower their prices. Most don’t need to sell because their properties are their second homes or are rentals.

“The sellers are definitely holding out on their price,” Brooke Roberts with the Land Title Guarantee Company said.

Buyers are coming to resort areas expecting to find the same kind of deals they are seeing in other parts of Colorado. But in Summit County, there have not been a lot of foreclosures.

“It’s kind of a stand of between the buyer and the seller,” Roberts said.

There are about three times as many properties on the market now in Summit County as there were this time last year.

“There is a very healthy inventory in Summit County right now, which is great for buyers,” Roberts said.

For the places that have sold, more buyers have paid with cash since financing has been tougher to get.

Another trend in the mountain towns is fractional ownership. That’s when more than one person purchases property, sharing the cost and the property.

One real estate niche that hasn’t slowed is the sale of homes priced at $1 million and up. One home just sold for $5.5 million, a record for Summit County.

More Resort Homes For Sale, Prices Don’t Drop
by Andrea Lopez