The Steamboat Pilot & Today

The day may have arrived. Joy Rasmussen of Colorado Group Realty confirmed she has a custom home on Winchester Court listed for $1 million and there is serious interest.

At the same time, Brian Ladd of ReMax Steamboat has listed a 4,000 square foot custom home with an asking price of $989,900 and it is under contract.

Silver View is situated on 110 acres off Routt County Road 42, just west of the Steamboat city limits. Developer W.C. White sold the first lot for $65,000 in the late 1990s. Routt County’s original approval for the subdivision stipulated that some of the lots be reserved for homes beneath a size threshold to ensure that at least some of the new homes would be “affordable” for people in the local work force. Subsequently, a number of small modular homes appeared in the neighborhood. All 129 of the original lots had sold by December 2004, and with the scarcity of land within the city limits, prices have moved up steadily.

Ladd says based on current land values and a price per square foot in the mid $200's, he probably could have justified an asking price of $1.1 million had he been determined to wait a little longer.

The home Rasmussen represents was built by a contractor who lives in it. It has 3,888 square feet of finished space and a total of 4,495. Built with heavy timbers and logs, it has two family rooms and twin two-car garages.

Rasmussen tells m many of the buyers in Silver Spur are locals whose perceptions of the subdivision have changed since the 1990s.

"Locals are watching Silver Spur for the right home to come on the market," she said.

Ladd says lingering perceptions of Silver Spur as a place where modest modular homes were erected have been evolving. Now, it's viewed as one of the last places to buy a modern family home on a lot of four-tenths of an acre.

The scarcity of land in Steamboat is the true driver of prices in Silver Spur he tells us.

There are currently four or five homes under contract in the subdivsion with asking prices beginning at $625,000. The next in line was listed for $795,000. It looks like homes in Silver Spur are averaging about 8 days on the market before they go under contract. However, Realtors say there haven't been bidding wards.

The most recent home to sell was listed by Wendy Fisher and Crystal Staepel of Anchor Realty at an asking price of$899,000. It closed this week for $885,000.

The question that remains to be answered is whether the arrival of the $1 million threshold in the U.S. 40 West Corridor will create ripples to the east within the city limits of Steamboat Springs.