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Eagle Ridge townhome sales

Steamboat Springs — Jon Wade, of Colorado Group Realty, sees signs that the market is stabilizing but isn’t ready to say the overall market has turned the corner.

“A year ago, I would have said we’re still getting beat up, but now a recovery seems possible,” Wade told a gathering of Chamber members last week. “I had 10 or 12 multiple-offer situations last summer into the fall.”

If a full-blown recovery arrives, it will not be the deliverance of every real estate product within every price point at once, Wade predicted. Instead, it will be more like a busy street with different kinds of vehicles and lanes of traffic, or perhaps a river with braided channels and currents.

“Prices right now are at 1980 to 2007 levels depending upon the property,” Wade said. “How fast the market comes back might depend upon where you are standing in the stream.”

Stan Urban, of Land Title Guarantee Co., said that transaction volume was up dramatically in December 2011 when compared with December 2010 but that dollar volume was off by double digits.

“December was a good month with $47 million in gross volume and 136 transactions, making it the third strongest in volume of the year,” Urban said. “December came in 72 percent higher than the preceding December of 2010 in number of transactions but was down 13 percent in dollar volume.”

The standout sale in terms of price per square foot in December 2011, Urban said, was the $2.83 million sale of a five-bedroom Edgemont condo that translated into $775.67 per square foot.

Wade pointed to the five-bedroom units in Eagle Ridge Townhomes as an example of a development where prices gradually are moving back toward 2007 pricing. He was careful to say that, within the project, some townhomes are more desirable depending on whether they are end units and have views of the ski area. Prices have moved back up after selling from the low $1 million range in April 2007, cresting at what now appears to Wade to be a completely irrational $1.6 million in September 2007 and subsequently dropping to $800,000 as recently as August 2011. Recently, a pair of townhomes at Eagle Ridge sold for $950,000, Wade said.

“Eagle Ridge Townhomes has shown remarkable stability if you take out one sale that made no sense at the time,” Wade said.

Doug Labor, of Buyers Resource Real Estate, concurred that there are pieces of the overall market where inventory isn’t as abundant as one might guess.

“There are some segments where there isn’t a lot of good inventory left, from one $1 million to $1.5 million,” Labor said.

Realtor Dutch Elting, of Prudential Steamboat Realty, brought the buyers to an $800,000 short sale at Eagle Ridge townhomes in August.

He said, his buyers, who sold a house in Ohio to make the deal happen, have moved in full time and are thrilled.

“They got a pretty good deal,” Elting said. “It has fabulous southern views and was just the kind of thing they were trying to find.”

Elting said relatively low homeowners association dues make the townhomes appealing to buyers.

On the other hand, Elting said it has been difficult to sell condominiums and surmises that market segment will be among the last to recover.

“We can see the recovery coming, but the horizon varies by the part of the market you are in, and there will be bumps along the way,” Wade said.

To reach Tom Ross, call 970-871-4205 or email tross@SteamboatToday.com