Condos have come up a lot in our coverage of America's ski towns, particularly in the more mature real estate markets of places like Park City, Aspen, Vail, and Jackson Hole. With national forest land, open space requirements, and the like constraining the amount of single-family homes that can be built, developers have been turning to downtown districts to find their next project, and have been building more and more expensive condos and penthouses on top of storefronts in order to cash in on rich buyers who want in in their favorite ski town but can't find enough options in the "suburbs" or want more of a city-esque experience.
Whatever the case, condo prices give you a good idea of where different ski town real estate markets are at. The condo we saw last week in the Arrabelle at Vail Square , with 4,329 square feet and hotel amenities going for $8 million, evens out to around $1,900 a square foot, while the crazy listing by heavyweight Aspen broker Joshua Saslove we covered in March is attempting to sell a 4,638 square foot four-bedroom penthouse at an astonishing $3,800 a square foot - $17,600,000.
So when a handsome-looking penthouse goes on sale in Sun Valley for $772 a square foot, it seems like a screaming deal, especially when you take into consideration the town's own roster of seriously monied buyers, like Bruce Springsteen and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It ain't cheap construction either, with a clean, spacious interior sporting some nice contemporary touches, including the stainless steel and dark wood kitchen, funky bath tub, three terraces, three bedrooms, three and a half baths, TV room, and views of Sun Valley's Bald Mountain. At $2,895,000, it's still asking a lot, but is still a fraction of what Colorado's most prized ski town markets would charge. Does it seem like any more of a deal?
· Coyote Moon E-4 [Thunder Spring Real Estate]