The following pages have statistical summaries, in table and graph form, for the communities of Old Snowmass, Basalt, Missouri Heights, and Carbondale. I’m not including Glenwood Springs because there are so many errors in the data (there are mobile homes & condos in the ‘single-family’ category) that it is returning false market information.

• I would take this opportunity to make a plea to all Realtors to please enter data into proper categories and give us information we need to properly analyze a property – since the changes that were made last August, fields such as garage, lot size or acreage, remodel year, and concessions are missing or blank. Concessions are not the same as commissions and it doesn’t make sense to appraisers that this field was removed. We don’t want to disturb your, or our, productivity with lots of phone calls, but we are held to account for the information we use in our reports.

All of these markets experienced the same pandemic surge that occurred in Aspen (who would have thought that the result of Covid was people coming to our valley and over-paying for their real estate?). I ran a historic trend analysis for a fractional estate client recently, and found the results to be enlightening. Refer to the last two tables (one of Carbondale and one of Aspen) which show growth rates over the last 21 years ... the 10-year growth rate including the pandemic surge is more than 5x (Aspen) and 6x (Carbondale) the period immediately preceding the pandemic. On the other hand, the 21-year historic growth rate is pretty much in the same range, or just slightly lower. Things that make you go “hmmm …”  This is one to show your clients – no one is saying our markets don’t experience dips along the way but an average annual 15% historic return on investment is nothing to sneeze at.

Most of this data is self-explanatory, but a few more observations that stood out to me:

• Wealthy vacation home buyers have become an influential factor in Basalt, Mo Heights, and Carbondale
• 2024 Median Price declined in three of these markets (OSM, Basalt, Mo Hts), OSM experiencing a 28% decrease
• Carbondale Median Price went from $850,000 in 2019 to $2,150,000 in 2024 – a 153% increase
• Carbondale is the only market that doesn’t have a majority Negative trends in a year-over-year comparison (2/28/25 compared to 2/29/24)
• OSM, Basalt & Mo Hts have a majority of Negative trends on their YOY comparison – Basalt and Mo Hts, in particular, are markets to watch closely, although their inventory is at reasonable levels

Those are my interesting “finds” as I dug through the data, and following are the numbers (note the pink highlights the low, the green highlights the high). Thank you for the opportunity to nerd out on numbers and share them with you, please give us a call if you have any questions or comments – especially if you are experiencing something contrary to my observations.  We look forward to speaking with you and working with you on any property valuation needs you may have from Aspen to New Castle – one last plug, we recently started training and accepting assignments for undivided interest (fractional) appraisals, mainly used in valuing a family member’s or partner’s interest. I’d be happy to discuss this further if you have a client in need of this service.

Susan Ebert-Stone, SRA