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| Ice Lake above Silverton on the 4th of July |
We've been at this business a long time. And by this business I mean - selling people on Durango. We've been doing that long before either of us ever become actively involved in real estate. For Chris, a trip here with his Aunt, Uncle and Cousins to ride the train from Durango to Silverton (http://www.durangotrain.com/) when he was twelve was the first time he realized that this town was a good fit. Kris discovered it as a very young child on family trips from Albuquerque, their favorite home away from home. In life there are places we go, and places we fall in love with. Durango isn't for everyone. No place is. The two of us have an average of 34 years of experience in and around Durango, and a combined 26 year history in the resort real estate market. We know Durango, as the slogan goes, and we specifically know the resort community in Durango. Over the years we've noticed some fairly common themes with our customers, reasons they've chosen to call Durango a home, or a second home. If you have any of these same interests or characteristics, this town and this community may be a very good match.
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| Kris, a sister and her father at Purgatory circa? |
1. A disinterest, some would say a disdain, for the see and be seen.
Some call it glitz and glamour. Some call it Hollywoodization. Some describe it as arrogance, high falutin, pretension, self conceited etc... Durango is virtually absent all of the above. I once contacted a real estate agent in Aspen, someone who I shared an acquaintance with, and suggested that he and I share leads whenever we had someone who might be interested in both towns. He said, "None of my clients are interested in Durango." I was a little taken aback, insulted really. I'd lived in Aspen at one time, and had never thought it superior in the way he obviously did. I actually had plenty of clients that had looked in Aspen before coming here. But after these many years, I have to agree that in general people interested in Aspen, that buy property there, tend not to buy property here. We've had plenty of clients that look at both, that can certainly qualify to buy in both places, but if they buy here instead of there, they generally express to us in some way that they chose Durango because Aspen, or places like it (you know who you are Telluride, Sun Valley, Vail...), just wasn't a good fit. They say things like, "I don't want to worry about what brand of ski clothes I have on, or how I'm dressed in the market." And here they don't have to. Durango was once voted the worst dressed town in America for two years running, and we're kind of proud of it. Celebrities come sometimes and some live here, but they tend to be the low-key kind. They like to be treated like everyone else, and they like it here because that's how everyone is generally treated. Many people trade in their luxury cars for Subaru's after a few years of living here, mainly because all of the cache of having one sort of seems irrelevant here.
Yes, this is a slogan you see around here a bit, and it fits pretty well with number one. In some places it's just lip service, but here it's the truth. The community is diverse. There's a great liberal arts college, a fantastic emergent technology sector, a vibrant organic agriculture and ranching community, over a million tourist visitors a year, and more restaurants per capita than San Francisco (there are six on my block). In short, it's a town with more of a purpose than a decorative sensibility, beautiful as it is. Unlike many mountain towns, Durango doesn't just put on a smile during its "season" and shut down in the "off-season." Businesses are open year-round and you'll get the same fabulous service if you walk into a restaurant at 9pm in October as you will in the peak of the winter ski season or summer tourist season. And as a real town, we have more diversity of things to do. The college has an incredible array of concerts at the Community Concert Hall, we have a vibrant arts community, plentiful shopping that means you can find everything you need within a few miles (Telluride Magazine once published a list of all the things that could not be bought in the Telluride valley, things like toilet paper were on it, diapers, etc...), and the most diverse recreational opportunities of any mountain community. Real town means real people too. People in Durango, for the most part, have real jobs, careers, an unusually high level of education, and they generally live here for the same reasons that many people travel here. If you've heard of Trustafarians, or know any, you're not likely to meet any here.
We're full of hard working professionals and pretty absent the kind of leisure class that equates with smarmy laziness. Not that we don't like to have fun or goof off on Friday afternoons every now and then.
3. Value
Not only does Durango not have an overblown sense of itself, but prices of everything from groceries, to clothing and furnishings, to real estate will not create the sort of sticker-shock that you get in some resort communities. I was skiing at a to-remain-unnamed resort last winter where ski lift tickets were over $100, ski school for two kids set me back $300, and lunch was the culinary equivalent of Burger King (no offense to the King) and the price equivalent of Tavern on the Green. It's not just about being expensive, but it is about feeling like your dollar has a good exchange rate with whatever you're buying. Some resort communities make you feel like you have to travel to Japan and exchange your dollars for yen to come back and buy sushi. I don't know about you, but that always takes away from the pleasure of the experience for me. An adult day pass at Durango Mountain Resort is still less than the day pass price at Vail I had to pay when I was sixteen (I'm forty now). I grew up skiing at Vail and all of the overcrowded front range places, and I can assure you that a $100+ lift ticket at some of those places doesn't equate to an extra $40 of value. But they have 1,000 lifts you might say. They have a million runs! There are bowls! They have a $20 hamburger! People where moon boots that look like:
Just because a place is so big that they can handle the immense size of the lumbering lemming-like masses that populate them doesnt' mean you get value for your ticket. Can you make more great ski runs in a day because a place is bigger and more expensive? What makes a ski run great? Great snow, check. Long runs, check. Diverse terrain, check. Great weather, check (300+ days of sun a year - we never measure the temperature in wind-chill factors unlike just about every other high alpine ski area you know of). You can buy a whole-ownership slopeside two-bedroom condo at Durango Mountain Resort for under $200k. Value, check. If you like luxury, the brand new base area projects are complete and luxurious, and half the price or less of many of their competitors. They say the days of conspicuous consumption for consumption's sake are dead. I don't necessarily believe that, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't need to pay double the price just to say you did, Durango just might be your kind of value.
4. The Recreational Mecca - There's a reason you can't walk down the street in Durango without running into some world-class athlete or other. There's a reason multi-sport master-of-all-things Shaun White chose nearby Silverton, Colorado as his private training ground (Shaun White's Red Bull X Project in Silverton - checkout the "Back Country Freeride Video on this site to get a feel for what I mean by "back country"). The reason is millions and millions of acres of the most pristine and accessible back country in North America. What's your outdoors passion? Mountain biking, alpine skiing, telemark skiing, snowboarding, four-wheeling, off-road motorcycles, kite-boarding, hiking, snowshoeing, backpacking, kayaking, whitewater rafting, mountaineering, rock climbing, road biking, gliding, soaring, back country skiing and boarding, fly-fishing, trail running, spelunking, bouldering, -- it's all here and more, and it's all the best of the west. There is no other place like this.
5. The Weather. No hurricanes. No heat waves. No sub-zero temperatures (okay, maybe once in a long while), No tornadoes (in my lifetime that is, no guarantees). 300+ days of sunshine. We ski in ski vests or sweaters most of the time on 300 inches of light fluffy dry snow a year. It's 85 degrees and sunny on August 6th as I type, and that's a little hot. When people are comparing us to certain other towns in Colorado like Crested Butte I only have one thing to say - "Watch the national weather map for a few days in January and compare the two towns." When I was growing up I remember watching Willard Scott on The Today show. He often pointed out the coldest place in America, wherever it happened to be on that particular day. In Crested Butte's case, Gunnison, Colorado, just down valley a little ways from Crested Butte, was often that coldest place (average cold temperature in January - minus 8). Have you ever skied in -40 wind chill factor weather? I did a few times growing up, always in Summit County. Until I came to Durango I always thought skiing involved a certain amount of misery, frostbite, cold toes and such.
We'll send the next five out in our next posting. Last month when we issued the top ten things to do in Durango in the summer, it elicited a little controversy. We welcome your thoughts, and your business. If we can be of assistance in helping to make Durango part of your lifestyle, please let us know. Here's some food for thought on the current real estate market:
Reuters, Mortgage Rates Hit Record Lows, August 5, 2010
Note: A 1% rise in interest rates is generally equivalent to a 10% increase in the cost of a home. Even if you think we're not at the bottom yet in prices, we're certainly at the historic bottom in interest rates. Those who wait may be able to tell their friends... they got the best deal by a few more thousand dollars, but their real interest cost will make waiting a poor financial decision.
Don't forget to visit us on Facebook or Twitter where we constantly update you on only the best deals (not just our own listings) in the Durango area, and where we post notable real estate market news.
