December Calendar of Events

• 6th-8th                    Audi's Birds of Prey World Cup
• 7th                          Minturn Winter Market
• 9th-15th                  Vail SnowDaze
• 13th                         Rebelution 
• 14th                         Big Head Todd and the Monsters
• 14th                         Minturn Winter Market
• 15th                         Disco Skate Night
• 19th-20th                Family FunFest
• 20th-22nd                Vail Holidaze
• 21st                         Winterfest at Beaver Creek Begins
• 25th                         Christmas
• 30th                         Neil Berg's 100 Years of Broadway
• 31st                         Beaver Creek New Year's Eve Family Carnival
• 31st                         Vail New Year's Eve Celebration

Vail Valley real estate has best month in September

From the Vail Daily

By the numbers:

$7.15 million: September’s most expensive sale, in Beaver Creek.

8: Sales of homes priced at more than $4 million.

157: Total sales in September.

6: Bank sales in September, down from 15 in August.

Source: Land Title Guarantee Company

 For much of this year, local real estate sales stories have had at least some variation of, “transactions are up,
 but dollar volume is down from last year. September turned that sentence on its head.

Eagle County real estate sales in September — the last month for which numbers are available from Land Title Guarantee Co. — were actually down a bit from the same period in 2012. There were 175 total sales in September of 2012, and 157 for the same period this year. The difference is in price. Those sales this year added up to $151.3 million, an 8 percent increase over September of 2012. The difference in that dollar volume came in large part from sales of very expensive homes — $4 million and more. There were eight such sales in September, which accounted for nearly one-third of the total sales volume for the month. Those eight sales also made up a significant portion of the 33 total sales of $4 million or more through the first nine months of the year. While September’s dollar volume was an improvement over 2012, the sales volume so far for the year is still less than the sales through September of 2012 — albeit by just 2 percent. And as is usually the case in the Vail Valley market, homes priced at $1 million or less make up the vast majority of transactions — 74 percent in September. But those sales accounted for 34 percent of the dollar volume.

Bank sales declining

The good news for the lower end of the market — $500,000 and less — is that various kinds of bank sales, from foreclosures to short sales, keeps declining. In 2012, bank sales made up nearly 20 percent of all transactions. In September, there were only six such sales, down from 15 in August. As you’d expect, many of the 157 September sales — 32 — were in the primarily residential areas of Eagle and Gypsum. There were 13 sales in Avon. But there were 39 total sales from East Vail to Intermountain.

Eagle County home buyers are primarily from Colorado — 62 percent. A regional report from Land Title that covers Eagle, Summit, Pitkin, Grand, Garfield and Routt counties shows in-state clients make up about 60 percent of all clients.

Of the remaining regional buyers, just more than 1 percent are from other countries. In Eagle County, 3 percent of all buyers were from international markets. While real estate seems to be improving across the spectrum, the business still remains below the pre-recession rocket ride it was on.