Now that we’re past Labor Day, summer is coming to a close. School started on Tuesday. Bow hunters are out wandering around in the woods looking for deer and elk. The Four Corners Folk Festival happened over the weekend up on top of Reservoir Hill. We had a lot of soggy campers praying for sunshine!
The town is very busy like it has been all summer. The local economy has been very good and tax revenues are way up. The new downtown grocery store opened up a week or so ago. It went in where the old City Market used to be downtown. I went inside a couple of days ago and I was impressed. It sure is a lot more convenient for the folks who live downtown to have this new store. In the meantime, City Market is finishing up their $3.4 million renovation. Six months ago we had one grocery store and now we have three, with Walmart in the middle.
We were all very excited when Outside magazine recently did a story about the “Top 16 Best Places to Live in America.” Pagosa Springs was named #9. That was a nice bit of publicity for our little town, but of course we all think we should have been #1!
The weather prognosticators are saying it will be a big snow year in the mountains. We’ll see what comes to pass, but the skiers and snowboarders would all love to see some record-breaking snow up in the hills. I can’t say that I would be very excited about it myself, but it’s good for the town, so I’ll at least go along with it.
Now for what’s happening in the real estate arena. It’s been quite busy but the stats don’t show the true story. As you can see from my stat sheet, home sales are now down 4% for the year. Vacant land and condos are still up for the year, but the numbers haven’t changed much from last month. The silver lining is that pending sales are way up; there are now 123 pending versus 80 last year at this time. I don’t know why there is a bottleneck holding up the closings. Pending sales have been up for the last couple of months. Hopefully next month’s numbers will show some better results. My business has been way up. In fact, I will be sending out some junk mail soon so I can acquire some new listings. So far this year, 12.5% of all sales and 18.5% of all vacant land sales in Pagosa have come across my desk. It’s a good thing that I enjoy being busy.
This month I will head up to Keystone for the Colorado Association of Realtors annual convention. These conventions are a great opportunity for me to brush up on my skills and learn all sorts of new things to help me stay on top of my game. I’ve got a couple more conventions booked through the fall and winter, and I’m looking forward to all of them.
So long for now, and I hope your fall is colorful and productive.
GRI, CRS
2011 & 2014 Realtor of the Year
Phone (970) 731-4065
Fax (970) 731-4068
Cell (970) 946-3856
Email: [email protected]
