Memorial Day Week

Memorial Day weekend is coming up, the traditional day of the start to summer, barbecues and pools opening. Unless you live in the mountains. A quick look at this week's forecast is calling for Saturday's weather of 47 degrees and rain, hardly makes you feel like summer. People frequently ask if Memorial Day is a busy weekend in real estate and a good time to hold open houses. Anywhere else but the mountains, this holds true. But up here, more people leave than come into town for the holiday.

Last week Thursday I hosted and was moderator for a panel discussion of resort Realtors for three of our neighboring resorts: Lake Tahoe, California; Sun Valley, Idaho; and Vail, Colorado, that was attended by the Park City Board of Realtors. It was a wonderful lunch meeting with over 200 Park City agents in attendance. Not surprisingly, while there are some regional differences, the state of real estate in each of these resorts is very similar to what we're seeing here in Park City. Numbers of sales were up, prices are down and the general feeling is that prices will not be rising anytime soon due to pressure from distressed properties. The differences are in the details for each area. For example, in Vail, high-end condos in the heart of the village have sold at over $2,800 a square foot. Lake Tahoe, where is the real focus of the resort is around the lake (instead of the ski resorts) there are very few condos for sale and prices are around $400 per square foot. Sun Valley is in between but closer to Lake Tahoe with maximum prices pushing but not exceeding $1,000 a square foot. Here in Park City, our high-end ski-in/ski-out hotels on the mountain of Deer Valley sell for between $1,300 and $1,500 per square foot. (Throughout the 16 years I've been involved with the Western Mountain Resort Alliance, prices and amount of real estate sold in Vail have always been the envy of the other resort Realtors.) Each of the resorts reported that skier visits to the resorts, lodging numbers and retail numbers were up 5-10% over last year. Everyone was pretty happy with this gain and gave their confidence that this summer's real estate activity and visitor traffic would continue with upward trends.


This morning I heard a presentation from a lender affiliated with Bank of America. Her news was very discouraging in that the word out of Washington is that starting July 1, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will no longer be purchasing mortgage-backed securities. If this does occur, the already difficult financing market will become even more difficult and we'll see a significant rise in interest rates. The National Association of Realtors and several large lenders are lobbying very hard to prevent this from occurring as it will significantly impact the housing market and thus the economic recovery of our country. I expect that savvy investors will be looking to purchase prior to this happening. My understanding is that purchasers with financing will have to close prior to July 31 to avoid higher interest rates and more restrictive lending requirements. Here in Park City real estate sales are extremely active for this time of the year. In looking at daily activity, I am very surprised at both the number of sales occurring every day and the variety of properties that are being purchased.

I hope you have an enjoyable holiday weekend. It will eventually stop raining and snowing up here and we will get on to summer and all of the activities that we have come to love and enjoy in the mountains.