MAKE WAY FOR THE MILLIONAIRES

Workers’ Enclaves Becoming Wealthy Escapes in Roaring Fork Valley

By David Frey, 8-16-06

Squeezed by retirees migrating down from Aspen on one end and by the booming energy industry on the other, Roaring Fork Valley real estate prices are soaring in towns once considered workers’ enclaves, and the workers are getting pushed out.

In Basalt and Carbondale, median prices for single-family homes hover over $1 million. Prices are on the rise, too, in Glenwood Springs and points west.

Properties throughout the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys are selling for unprecedented sums, and despite weakening home markets on Colorado’s Front Range and elsewhere in the country, market watchers say they see no end in sight to high home prices here as unflagging demand meets a very limited inventory of homes.

“They’re being squeezed from both sides,” Susan Shirley, executive director of Mountain Regional Housing Corporation, which works to create affordable housing in the Roaring Fork Valley, told me for a story in the Aspen Daily News. “There is a lot of pressure coming from Aspen, but now also Rifle, Silt and New Castle are under pressure from the gas industry, and some of those people are paid very well. They’re renting stuff, and they’re buying everything they can find.”

The result has been astonishing price tags in a valley used to high real estate prices. Last month, it was Carbondale, not Aspen, that saw the most-expensive home sale in Colorado history when the 1,705-acre Crystal Island Ranch sold for $47 million. A house in the River Valley Ranch golf subdivision, sitting on 80 acres, is listed at $15 million.

Seven-figure Carbondale homes are becoming commonplace. Over half of the 120 single-family homes on the market in the area – 62 of them – are listed between $1 million and $2 million. The cheapest single-family home on the market in Carbondale is $399,000.

That leaves Carbondale with a median single-family home price of $1,188,230. For the first half of the year, median home sales of all types of Carbondale homes rose 10 percent to $423,000, up from $384,250 a year ago.

“It’s getting higher and higher,” said Sarge Whalen, a real estate agent with Mason & Morse in Carbondale. “We’re getting more and more million-dollar sales. In years gone by it was kind of a rarity, but not anymore.”

Carbondale’s not far behind Basalt, where the median price for single-family homes is $1,235,000. The median-price of Basalt homes leaped 53 percent through June, from $369,500 a year ago to $565,000.

In Glenwood, single-family homes are listed at a median of $599,000. Those listings include six homes listed over $1 million. The median price for homes overall rose 22 percent, up to $370,000, up from $301,000 a year ago. The average home price rose $72,980.

Prices west of Glenwood are chasing close behind. Homes in New Castle are selling for over a half a million.

“Low interest rates and people moving in with the energy business contributed to it,” said Pat Fitzgerald, a real estate agent with Glenwood Brokers. “I’m seeing a lot of retirees moving in. Let’s face it. We live in a great place. If they can figure out how to make a living here, they’re moving here.”

For many homebuyers, this summer is a pivotal one, Shirley said. If they’re not in the market now, they may not get in.

“There are no options for anybody,” she said. “You can’t move up. You can’t move down. You can’t move sideways.”

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