Every once in a while, I get a wild hair to see how the Durango and La Plata County real estate market compares to other similar counties in the state. To make the quick case: yeah, I consider La Plata County a resort county. While we have all the fixins of a community, Durango also offers all the recreational "resort" activities: skiing, mountain biking, rafting, fishing, hiking -all that jazz, along with the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, festivals, events and more. Onto the real estate!

In short, numbers are all over the place! I'm seeing some big swings in year-over-year and year-to-date trends. Makes me think we're seeing the beginning of another shift as markets finally adjust to higher mortgage rates and increasing inventory. In other words, after the last 3 years, it looks like things are finally starting to trend away from a Seller's market.

(Keep in mind, we're talking counties here. The resort specific towns within these counties could (and probably do) have a different data set than the county as a whole. Since limited data will skew the numbers, I opted to analyze a larger constrained area and use median sales prices instead of average to try to give a balanced perspective.)
Compared to the other counties, La Plata still remains affordable, but YTD not the most affordable, as the median sales price of TH/Condos has surpassed Gunnison County (which includes Crested Butte). I don't know what's going with Pitkin County's TH/Condo data: $165K as the median sales price? That number is typically in a solid 7 figure range; their single family home prices still remain off the charts, despite a 16% decrease YTD from 2022. San Miguel County (Telluride & Mountain Village) leads the pack in median TH/Condo sales price, up nearly 39% YTD from 2022.

Some other significant YTD changes to note are:
  • Summit (Vail) seeing days on market (DOM) increases of over 100% for all housing, along with a roughly 20% drop in new listings for all housing.
  • While San Miguel might have cranked up the sale price of their TH/Condo segment, their single family sales are down 35% and the median sales price dropped 46%.
  • Eagle still thinks this is 2022: single family new listings and solds are down 23% and 21%, and TH/Condo new listings are down 42% and solds are down 47%, yet the median TH/Condo sales price is up 26%, and DOM is up over 100%.
  • Routt's (Steamboat Springs)inventory is more of the same: new listings and sold listings across all categories down 23% to 41%, but their sales prices are barely down in TH/condo and barely up in single family.
  • DOM in Grand in the TH/condo segment is up 228%, while inventory is down and sales prices are holding somewhat steady.
  • Gunnison (Crested Butte) has the same amount of YTD sales in the single family segment, but the median sales price is down 19%, along with the median sales price of their TH/condo segment, now making that market more affordable than La Plata's. 
  • La Plata doesn't have too many extremes, yet. Prices in all housing still continue to steadily climb, and just like the other counties, new and sold listings are down 20%-34%.
  • Pitkin had some weird data for the TH/Condo segment. According to the MLS, there were 0 sold in JUN22, and 5 sold this June, with just 4 sold YTD JUN22. Their numbers in single family are down across the board: 22% less sold at 16% lower median sales price in single family.
I was going to speak to YoY data, but I think the above graphs are pretty self explanatory. In lieu of another novel, I decided to put together one more chart, showing the change of Months of Inventory, which is a calculation of new listings, under contract listings and sold listings; pretty much how many months it would take to sell through current inventory given current conditions. If you give it a google, you'll find significance defined by varying ranges, so here's how I see it: 3 months and under is a Seller's market due to high absorption and low inventory. 3-6 months is a balanced market, and if there's over 6 months of inventory, it's a Buyer's market, due to all the available inventory that isn't moving quickly. Some huge changes from last June, and you'd think prices should be catching up to inventory trends any day now. Have they already reacted to interest rates, or is the effect of 7% still yet to have a full impact on our market? There's still a lot of cash buyers out there.