{"id":2454841,"date":"2020-02-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-21T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=321290"},"modified":"2020-02-21T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T07:00:00","slug":"aspen-real-estate-billions-sold-and-a-billionaires-hold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-real-estate-billions-sold-and-a-billionaires-hold\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen real estate: Billions sold and a billionaire\u2019s hold"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Mark Fox\/The Aspen Times<\/strong>
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, views the Aspen-area residential real estate market through a lens of tens.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery, very few markets in this country have this 10-10-10 market situation of where you have a (10,000) square-foot-house that costs $10 million for a home buyer who wants to use it only 10 days a year,\u201d he told the packed ballroom crowd at The St. Regis Aspen Resort.<\/p>\n

Yun\u2019s remarks \u2014 while steeped in reality \u2014 attracted scattered chuckles from those at the Aspen Board of Realtors\u2019 Annual Market Update Luncheon on Thursday. They also punctuated appraiser Randy Gold\u2019s assessment of the local property market\u2019s current status.<\/p>\n

Gold, whose Aspen Appraisal Group has been analyzing property values in the upper Roaring Fork Valley for 42 years, said he expects 2020 to be another year of high sales-dollar volume ignited by sales of single-family homes over $10 million. He tempered his comments, however, by noting national and global events could come into play.<\/p>\n

Overall property sales rung up in Pitkin County in 2019 \u2014 which include all types of real estate ranging from commercial to residential \u2014 amounted to just over $1.8 billion, down a tad from 2018, Gold said, basing his figures on data from Land Title Guarantee Co. Last year also was buoyed by 23 single-family home sales that topped the $10 million mark, falling shy of the record number of 27 eight-figure deals in 2015 and 26 in 2017.<\/p>\n

Gold said the market was strong last year, based on his discussions with area property brokers, \u201cand I think they feel that way because the single-family markets in Aspen and Snowmass did so well. But when you look at it realistically, and based on the numbers, it was a good, solid year, a little over $1.85 billion in sales, but that was actually down a little bit from the $1.863 billion we saw in 2018 and well below the $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion that was our highest ever in 2006 and 2007.\u201d<\/p>\n

A return to those mid-2000s seems unlikely in the near future, Gold said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAspen is not immune to what happens nationally,\u201d he said, noting fears of a national recession happening in 2020 or 2021, while having dampened last year, have recently re-emerged.<\/p>\n

Some of that is because coronavirus outbreak in China, which will impact the global economy \u201cif they don\u2019t get their hands around this thing soon,\u201d Gold said. Wall Street also has a role, as does this year\u2019s U.S. presidential contest, he said.<\/p>\n

Gold said he expects \u201canother strong year for sales over $10 million\u201d in Aspen, while he also predicted overall sales in Pitkin County to hover between $1.6 billion and $1.8 billion in overall sales volume.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 2020 finishes the way I\u2019m forecasting, with little change or down modestly again, the Aspen-Snowmass market seems like it\u2019s continuing slowly toward our next down market,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On the day after Wednesday\u2019s haymaker-dominated Democratic debate \u2014 candidate Michael Bloomberg had to defend his wealth, while Bernie Sanders had to defend his ownership of three homes \u2014 and the same day that President Trump was stumping in Colorado Springs, Yum said there\u2019s little doubting the election\u2019s outcome will impact real estate sales.<\/p>\n

\u201c2020 is a presidential election year, and when I look at the data overall for the upper-end market (nationally), yes, there is a little hesitation,\u201d he said. \u201c(Home buyers) want to know for certain who will be elected before deciding on a major expenditure, because it could have tax implications or, say, right now Wall Street is at an all-time high, but the stock market community, I don\u2019t believe they want Bernie Sanders as their president. \u2026 It will be interesting to see how the market digests the presidential election.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no questioning, however, that billionaires continue to wield powerful influence on the local market, both in the residential and commercial arenas, Gold said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAspen has long been known for how many billionaires we have and their impact on the residential market,\u201d Gold said, noting he came up with \u201caround 60 (billionaires) that I can pretty positively identify.\u201d That figure might be closer to 75 or more billionaires \u201cthat own single-family houses, commercial property, or both,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a pretty staggering number, when you think about it, for a market as small as Aspen,\u201d Gold said, noting the figure doesn\u2019t trail far behind such major cities as New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo.<\/p>\n

To put a billionaire\u2019s affluence in perspective, Gold broke it down in simple yet astronomic terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have $1 million and you spend a dollar every second, you\u2019re out of money in 11 days,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re a billionaire, and you spend a dollar every second \u2014 $3,600 an hour \u2014 it takes you 32 years to spend your money.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wealthier the buyer, the more they can afford to overpay for property. The end result means property valuations increase, which translates to property taxes increase as well, Gold said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo for somebody who has a $10 million statement, a pretty respectable statement for most markets, that buyer can overspend $50,000 for a condominium. The guy who is worth $100 million, he can overspend $500,000. But the guy who\u2019s worth a billion dollars, let alone $2 billion, or $3 billion or $5 billion, they can easily overspend by $5 million and it has the same relative insignificance, or significance, depending on your perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

rcarroll@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Fox\/The Aspen Times Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, views the Aspen-area residential real estate market through a lens of tens. \u201cVery, very few markets in this country have this 10-10-10 market situation of where you have a (10,000) square-foot-house that costs $10 million for a home buyer who wants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2454841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 14:14:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}