Aspen Market

One the most expensive real estate deals in Pitkin County’s history closed Monday with the $41 million sale of the Jigsaw Ranch on the backside of Aspen Mountain. The deal involved separate transactions for the ranch’s upper and lower portions, said Brian Hazen, the Coldwell Banker Mason Morse real estate agent who represented the sellers.

The 44-acre upper portion of the spread in the Castle Creek Valley contains the main 12,247-square-foot residence at 565 Midnight Mine Road, which has six bedrooms and six baths; there is also a one-bedroom, one-bath gatehouse. That parcel sold for $27 million, while the 23-acre lower estate and its 5,760-square-foot home, along with a 1,200-square-foot guest house and a log cabin, sold for $14 million. “It was a strong sale,” Hazen said Thursday. He declined further comment, citing the “sensitivity” of the deal.

According to documents filed with the county clerk and recorder’s office, Castle Creek LLC, a Nevada-based company, sold the upper Jigsaw Ranch. Castle Creek LLC’s officers are George Rosenthal and his son, Mark. They are also the principals behind Raleigh Enterprises, which owns and operates commercial real estate, hotels, and movie and TV studio complexes, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The Rosenthals had owned Jigsaw Ranch for 37 years and sold it because they were looking for other challenges, including building a yacht, the article says. They put the property up for sale for $48.5 million in 2011.

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As the winter season approaches, managers at many of Aspen’s rental housing properties say occupancy is up with units going faster than they have in years.  There is currently only one apartment available at the 148-unit Centennial development, said Kim Keilin, Centennial property manager.   Units are being rented pretty much as soon as they open up at a pace she hasn’t seen in years, Keilin said.  “We’re doing really well,” she said.

Centennial rental managers made two buildings in the development dog friendly last year and those units are in high demand, Keilin said. Still, she doesn’t think those apartments are the driving force behind the recent surge in rentals, because not many of the dog-friendly units have become available, she said.
Meanwhile, occupancy at the city-owned Marolt Ranch complex is outpacing the past three years, said property manager John Mickles. Currently, 31 out of 95 units are rented, Mickles said.   Last year Marolt created a ladder rental structure, which it brought back this year, that charges less per month if renters sign a lease early. Still, last year at this time only 23 percent of the units were rented out, Mickles said.  “Indicators are that things are going to go pretty well.”

This year most of the people who have signed leases at Marolt are Americans, which is a departure from the past, Mickles said. Typically, Marolt serves as temporary seasonal housing for foreigners who have visas to work in Aspen for the winter. Occupancy at Marolt has dropped since federal policy changed a few years ago restricting the number of visas given out.

The dollar volume of real estate sales in Pitkin County soared in September compared with the prior year, thanks in large part to the $90 million exchange of Base Village in Snowmass Village.

The sales volume of $232.41 million was a 69 percent increase from $137.72 million in September 2011, according to a report released by Land Title Guarantee Co. That was the best performance in September since the pre-recession mark set in 2008.

Related Cos. purchased the stalled Base Village project from a consortium of four European lenders in September. The $90 million deal transferred the title of assets such as the Viceroy Snowmass hotel, retail units, unsold Capitol Peak and Hayden Lodge residences, the arrival center, parking garage and various land parcels. Related once owned the project but lost it when it defaulted on a loan during the recession.

The strong September marked the third month in a row with surging sales in Pitkin County, Land Title Guarantee’s report showed. July and August also were strong compared with the prior year. The first half of 2012 was a roller-coaster ride for the real estate industry. Dollar volume of sales was up in January, down in February, back up in March and then down in April, May and June.

Land Title Guarantee tracks sales of all residential property, from trailer homes to mansions, using deeds filed with the Pitkin County Clerk and Recorder’s Office. The data give a broader perspective than the Aspen-Glenwood Springs Multiple Listing Service.

Through the third quarter of 2012, total dollar volume was up 3.5 percent over the same period in 2011, the report showed. Total sales for the year topped $1 billion during September. In contrast, sales barely topped the $1 billion mark in all of recession-ravaged 2009.

The year-to-date dollar volume through third quarter 2012 was $1.01 billion this year compared with $977.07 million last year.

While dollar volume climbed, the number of transactions sagged by 12 percent in September to a total of 76. There were 517 year-to-date transaction through September, a decrease of 11.5 percent through the third quarter of last year.

With a decent fourth quarter, annual dollar volume should be the best this year since 2008 though nowhere near pre-recession levels.

The real estate market in the mid- and upper Roaring Fork Valley is on its way back, with Aspen showing more progress than Basalt and Snowmass Village, according to a presentation by broker associate Andrew Ernemann, of BJ Adams and Co., on Thursday.

Ernemann used a graph to demonstrate the cycle of attitudes in a real estate market and at what point in the cycle Aspen, Basalt and Snowmass Village each are in 2012.

Ernemann described Aspen’s market as optimistic, the beginning of the upward trend on his graph. Ernemann said the number of sales in Aspen was up so far in 2012 from last year, although sales of single-family homes and sales dollar volume are down. Sales price per square foot in Aspen is about flat.

Ernemann and other brokers have been relying more on price per square foot as a metric of the health of the market, he said. Change in price per square foot tends to follow the same trends across markets.

Ernemann said Snowmass Village and Basalt are in the “hope” stage, with Basalt moving toward optimism. The number of sales — as well as the sales dollar volume, average sales price and price per square foot — has been down in Snowmass Village over the past year. Those decreases each amounted to about 10 percent.

“You have to hit the bottom before you can head back up,” Ernemann said.  Click here to read the rest of the article.

SNOWMASS—A real estate agent who toured the local estate called it “probably the nicest house I have ever been through.”

That makes sense since the Old Snowmass property is the most expensive listing on the market in Colorado and one of the most pricy in the nation. Currently owned by children’s book author Patti Wheeler and her husband Tom, an entrepreneur, the 800-plus acre property on Watson Divide is listed for sale at $75 million.

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