Greetings,
We’ve finished the first quarter of 2019 and sales are a little better overall than I predicted. For the first three months of 2019 the dollar amount of sales in San Miguel County are up 4% and the number of sales are only down 1%. The U.S. economy is good, interest rates stable at around 4.125% nationally and locally too as of this date. Interest rates do not affect the market in luxury resort markets very much, but do set a general trend for the overall economy that our clientele watch carefully, like the stock market. As one of my long time wealthy clients once told me "We don’t have to make money on our pleasure purchases; we just don’t want to lose money on them if we can avoid that.” Basically, most affluent buyers are buying resort property for pleasure and just want to feel good about their portfolio and the economy in general.
March sales are very interesting. The dollar amount of sales were up 16% at $53.6M yet the number of sales were down 12% at 37 total sales. Four sales totaled $26,925,000 or 50% of the total dollar amount of sales. It took 33 sales to add up to the other half of the sales. That means that there are at least four Realtors that are very happy depending on how many of those four sales were done with a cooperating buyer’s broker or were in-house sales. Other observations were 37 condominium sales in the first quarter of 2019 in the combined market of the town of Telluride and Mountain Village. In that same period of time there were only 6 homes sold in both of those towns. The last couple of years have been a very, very strong condominium market and not nearly as much as a home sales market. That may be affecting the slow vacant residential lot sales in the combined market of Telluride/Mountain Village with only 6 lot sales in the first quarter of 2019. Overall inventory has not changed much in the last 100 days of the 2019 market with the only categories slightly up in number of available listings for Mountain Village condos and homes.
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to see the monthly cover page from Telluride Consulting.
Here are some random stats that you might find interesting:
- There are approximately 200 listings of houses and condominiums above $5M in the Aspen/ Snowmass market with about 7- 8 sales per month.
- Of the 5.4M homes sales in the U.S. last year, two thirds of those were $400K or less.
- There are less construction workers in the U.S. than 10 years ago.
- About 14K baby boomers retire every day or approximately 420K per month.
- Pending home sales in the U.S. are down since June of 2018.
- Interest rates may only see one increase this year...or maybe none.
- The U.S. economy is expected to grow this year at about a 2.2% rate and the global economy at about 3.3% by most economists. China is expected to grow at about 6% to 7% this year.
- The U.S. still has more billionaires than any other county in the world with China catching up fast.
- There are approximately 7 million job openings in the U.S. with hardly any qualified workers to fill them.
- Vanilla ice cream out sells the next best selling flavor by 4 to 1.
We love where will live in Telluride and in Colorado. If we can assist you in any way as a seller or a buyer here or anywhere in the world, we would be happy to do so. Our contact information is
George@TheHarveyTeam.net
or my cell number is 970-729-0111.
"Better to be an honest nobody than a dishonest somebody" – Unknown Cowboy
Best to you,
George Harvey, Jr.
