Home

Steamboat Homefinder

Visit SteamboatHomefinder.com for more real estate news.

Steamboat Springs — At first glance, the real estate offering appears to be an impossibility. Never mind the price, how could it be possible to buy 13 acres within the city limits of Steamboat Springs, including 31 platted single-family building lots? Toss in a refurbished historic ranch house with a detached bunkhouse, plus another small home moved to the site from Old Town and a large parcel of industrially zoned land, and it begins to sound more improbable.

Chances are, locals have driven by the property of longtime Steamboat residents Mike Kortas and his wife, Nina Darlington, many times without fully appreciating what they were looking at. Their home at the former Eckstein Ranch is secluded by shade trees on 13th Street/Twentymile Road, just a couple of minutes by bicycle from the public library.

The entire 13 acres is available for $1.8 million or broken into its component parts through Realtor Scott Eggleston. He also is offering 9.5 acres of the overall property, including the buildings and the development ground closest to the road, but not the 3.5 acres containing the platted lots, for $1.5 million.

"It's a remarkable deal," Darlington said.

Kortas said some of his efforts to market the property have been met with disbelief.

"At the peak of the market I ran an ad offering 7,000-square-foot lots in town for $100,000 and only got three calls," he said. "Later, people told me they thought it was a bogus ad. I've had quite a bit of interest, maybe six calls, from people interested in developing a mobile-home-style subdivision."

The single-family lots might be the most intriguing part of the offering; however, it's significant that the original lots that were platted as part of the 1905 Miller-Frazier subdivision are too small to be built on today - just 25 feet wide and 140 feet deep, Kortas said.

A developer could in theory combine two of the original lots into one single-family lot today, yielding 15 modern home sites on the property, he added.

"The industrial zoning requires that the primary use be industrial, but you could build a garage of equal size to the home" in order to comply, Kortas said.

Two city streets, 13th and Critter Court, lead directly to the lots. Kortas added that $40,000 in prepaid water/sewer taps is in place.

"I'd love to preserve this home," Kortas said. People who have looked at it in that configuration have been interested in either the home or a light industrial/commercial development, but not both, he said. So he would entertain offers for different pieces of the overall property.

Kortas and Darlington live in a modernized 1935 ranch

house on the property that is notable for its split river rock exterior finishes and a spectacular stone fireplace incorporating beautiful rocks of quartz and petrified rocks, as well as stones evoking a longhorn steer's head and two heart-shaped rocks.

Kortas, a mason by trade, carefully rebuilt the fireplace to transform it into a modern heating appliance and also added a garage/office/deck space also sided with a close approximation of the original split stone.

In another era, the home was occupied by the Charles and Mary Eckstein family. They raised sheep on 500 acres stretching south up the flanks of Emerald Mountain. Kortas said their granddaughter, Pat Derr, told him that Mary Eckstein had an upholstery business in an outbuilding that still remains on the property and that Charles trimmed sideburns in a three-chair barbershop in downtown Steamboat.

They sold their land to Newell Grant, of Yampa Valley Land and Cattle Co., in about 1970, Kortas said, and the land was annexed into the city in 1992.

He bought his piece of the ranch from Grant in 2003 for about $650,000.