An aerial view of the property.
Jeremy Swanson / Compass
A rambling estate in affluent Aspen has broken the record for priciest pad ever to sell in Colorado — but it likely won’t hold the title for long.
The Ranch at Owl Creek features 60 landscaped acres, views of all four of Aspen’s ski resorts and a closing price of a cool $77 million, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The property was sold by a Colorado-based LLC linked to the headquarters of the Lauridsen Group, which the Journal notes oversees companies in the health and nutrition space.
Not far from this property, however, hockey player Patrick Dovigi’s 4.5-acre compound is reportedly under contract for $110 million — meaning as soon as that deal closes, it will become the state’s record holder.
(Dovigi’s offering, built in 2006, features approximately 22,000 square feet, a main house and a guest residence. In sum, there are 11 bedrooms, a garage and a pool, the Journal reported.)
“This record-breaking transaction further cements Aspen’s position as a top-tier market for exclusive and prestigious properties, attracting discerning buyers from around the globe,” Compass’s Doug Leibinger, who held the ranch listing, told The Post. Leibinger, to the Journal, declined to comment on the identities of the buyer and seller.
The state record was previously held by a ski-in, ski-out residence, which sold for $76 million last year.
Bordered by 850 acres of green space, the ranch is primely located within minutes of the Snowmass and Buttermilk ski lifts, and a short drive to downtown Aspen.
Set at the end of a long driveway, the main house measures in at approximately 11,400 square feet, and has a home theater and wine cellar.
There’s also a guest cottage, a pool and a pool house with a glassed-in gym on the grounds.
The spread was initially listed back in 2022, for $70 million. That was before being removed from the market, renovated and then returned to it with a new price tag of $80 million in November 2023.
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- Colorado’s property taxes surged after wealthy Americans opted to move during the pandemic
- Longtime residents say they have faced tax bill hikes of up to 40 percent as their property values soared
Longtime Colorado residents are being forced to sell their homes and drain their savings after a huge pandemic influx sent their property taxes soaring.
Retired X-ray technician Marleen Gamble, 84, told an investigation by the New York Times that she has been selling almost all of her possessions – including her prized jewelry – after suffering a 20 percent property tax spike.
‘Every knickknack I have, everything I don’t use, I’m selling,’ she said. ‘What I owe now is $962.62. I think I need to use two credit cards to do it. And I’m going to have to pay interest on those.’
Yet, the senior isn’t even among the worst afflicted Coloradoans, with some seeing their payments surge by up to 40 percent.
The new dynamic has been fueled by pandemic homebuyers, who sought the refuge of the Rocky Mountains to wait out lockdowns and enjoy the outdoors while working from home.
Colorado lawmakers have been searching for solutions to the crisis, however the reason for the surge makes the challenge even tougher.
Namely, because the population increased and many were affluent people with the ability to move easily in the pandemic, local and state governments have also struggled to keep up with expanding services, with property taxes a prime funding tool.
This has meant that offering relief to struggling homeowners has hardly been met.
‘This has been a phenomenon in Colorado, Montana, Utah, Arizona, the Western states,’ Colorado Governor Jared Polis told the Times.
‘If your home value went up 40 percent, that might be a wonderful thing on the equity front, but it doesn’t mean you have 40 percent more cash to pay taxes.
‘Your salary might have only gone up over two years 10 percent or 12 percent. That’s the challenge we face.’
In Colorado, property taxes are calculated by multiplying the property’s value by a statewide rate set by the state government, which is then multiplied by a town’s mill levy rate decided by the cost of services such as schools.
An increase in residents increases the cost of public services – and the amount of tax levied to pay for them.
Tax expert Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, told the Times that the reason the tax bills have soared so considerably is due to several factors.
In particular, property values are assessed by the state every two years, so property taxes are being calculated based on mid-2022 prices when interest rates were low and home prices were at their height.
He also cited a failure from Colorado’s local governments to reduce their mill levy rates, and the 2020 repeal of the Gallagher Amendment that limited how much homeowners would have to pay in property taxes.
‘Colorado is mired in a property tax mess with no easy way out,’ added Billy Hamilton, the deputy chancellor and chief financial officer of the Texas A&M University System.
In Douglas County, between Denver and Colorado Springs, one in five homeowners are facing at least a 40 percent spike in property taxes, according to the Common Sense Institute.
Brittany Hailey, a property manager in the mountainous area of Carbondale, said areas like hers have been particularly affected as wealthy people preferred them when they made the move.
This has resulted in a lack of affordable housing, forcing less affluent families to move elsewhere.
‘The billionaires are pushing the millionaires down the valley,’ she said.
Pitkin County manager Jon Peacock, who oversees the rich skiing community of Aspen, added: ‘That could put some folks at risk of not being able to stay in the community.’
Notably, Colorado homeowners have still been paying less than much of the rest of the country. Before recent increases, the median annual property tax bill for primary residences in Colorado in 2021 was $2,259, or 19 percent below the national median of $2,795.
But for people like Hailey, who owns two homes in the area, her family have seen their property tax bill surge by over 36 percent.
And because she often rents out her home, a new bill could add even more to her bills, as it would classify homes rented out for more than 90 days a year as commercial properties – which pay four times higher rates.
‘The lawmakers think that this will maybe reduce the number of second homes, or punish people who have more than one home,’ she said. ‘They’re trying to find a scapegoat.’
This was agreed with by second homeowner Mike DeGuire, a retired school principal who said the entire tax structure should be re-written to fund the state’s underfunded schools.
‘Maybe we’re not thinking the way we should with property taxes,’ DeGuire said. ‘It’s almost a psychological thing — people are used to getting their refunds, and they’re used to their taxes not being so high, so we’re in a real bind.’
A state task force organized by Polis has proposed several recommendations to fix the crisis, including allowing the state to step in if property taxes cross a certain threshold.
They have also suggested separating school funding from other funding and reducing commercial housing rates, to help second homeowners renting out their homes.
A HOMEOWNER has been forced out of his highly invested into home after dealing with a nightmare HOA situation.
John, from Fort Collins, Colorado, had no choice but to sell his property for a fraction of what it was worth to an investor.
John had to sell his home at a low price to avoid it being sold at an HOA-induced foreclosure auction from unpaid payments to the association, Colorado Sun reported in 2023.
He inherited the property which is worth $350,000 from his grandmother who put $250,000 of equity into it.
But the HOA said he owed them around $12,000 which he was unable to pay.
John tried to fight the unpaid bills and foreclosure in court but ended up racking up $17,500 in attorney fees and lost the case.
He was offered $110,000 for the home by an investor after walking out of court and had no choice but to sell to cover all his debt.
John said he would only profit about $20,000 to $30,000 from selling the parking lot of the home.
His Colorado home was located in the area where he grew up which added to his cherishment of the place.
“It’s definitely unfair,” John said.
“Absolutely it’s unfair.
“This is pretty much where I grew up.
“To have to watch it go for not even anything close to what it’s worth — and to have to watch it go period.
“Just sucks.”
LOST EVERYTHING
The HOA foreclosure issue is not uncommon, especially in Colorado where it has reportedly had more than 250 homes sold off at an auction for a fraction of the price due to unpaid fees.
Darin Bigus, 37, owned a home in the heart of Aurora and the value of it skyrocketed while he was living in it plus he remodeled – but after missing HOA payments, the association was able to foreclose.
Bigus is familiar with construction and redid the house’s interior, and added a garden along with a concrete patio with embedded fiber optic lights.
The house was bought for $267,500 in 2015 and was worth around $520,000 in 2022.
He was banking on being able to make a profit on the home as an investment.
However, the HOA sold Bigus’s home for just $76,000 when they foreclosed it.
“I honestly thought someone was messing with me.”
Darin Bigus
The foreclosure occurred because Bigus’s payments got canceled after he got his debit card was stolen and had to get a new card in 2020.
The bill for his HOA payments grew to $8,619 after the HOA payments were stopped and he was not able to pay it.
WHAT IS A FORECLOSURE?
Homeowners or borrowers will receive a Notice of Default by their lender triggering the foreclosure process.
Those in HOA communities can also see their homes foreclosed by their HOA for falling behind on fees meaning that even if you keep up on mortgage payments, you can still lose your home.
Before foreclosure, a HOA will put a lien on your property which then allows them to auction it to reclaim unpaid funds.
The sale price of the property can often be much less than they are worth as it only needs to be enough to cover the debts to the HOA or lender and is sold via auction to the highest bidder.
“I honestly thought someone was messing with me,” Bigus told the Colorado Sun.
“It completely destroyed me financially.
“It destroyed my life.”
An investor bought Bigus’s home at a low price from the foreclosure auction and then resold it for half a million.
Bigus has been left devastated after losing the home that he put so much into.
exclusive
The Colorado home where JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in the 1990s has been taken off the market after a year without any buyers.
The notorious Boulder, Colorado residence where 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in 1996 has once again failed to find a buyer after being listed for sale for over a year, The Post has learned.
The property, located at 749 15th St., listed on March 1, 2023 with a hefty price tag of $6.95 million. Despite a significant price drop of $701,000 to $6.24 million seven months later, the home remained unsold.
Now, one year after its initial listing, the house — which recently was the subject of a viral TikTok video — has been pulled off the market.
This marks the sixth time the property has been up for sale, each time hoping that extensive renovations would help prospective buyers look past its haunting past.
Ramsey’s murder, which remains unsolved to this day, captured the nation’s attention.
The outgoing child beauty queen was found dead in the basement of her family home on Dec. 26, 1996. She had been bound and strangled, leaving her community and the nation in shock.
The young girl’s body was discovered after her now-deceased mother, Patsy, made a frantic 911 call reporting her daughter missing. Patsy found a lengthy ransom note, leading her to believe her daughter had been kidnapped. However, the girl’s lifeless body was found by her father, John, in a rarely used room of the basement.
The Ramseys moved out of the home immediately following the murder. It was later sold to an investor group for $650,000, with profits pledged to the JonBenét Ramsey Children’s Foundation.
Despite efforts to move on from the tragedy, the property remains a somber reminder of a young life gone far too soon.
Built in 1927, this grand Tudor has seen numerous expansions over the years, including a substantial top-floor addition by the Ramsey family.
Now boasting an impressive 7,571 square feet, the residence spans three stories along with a finished basement.
Nestled in the upscale University Hill neighborhood of Boulder, the house occupies a quarter acre, comprised of three lots within walking distance of UC Boulder.
The home enjoys a verdant setting, with towering trees and mature landscaping providing privacy from neighboring properties.
Encircled by a brick and wrought-iron gated fence, added after the Ramseys’ ownership, the property was once shrouded in dense foliage, as evident from past Google street views.
However, recent landscaping reveals the home’s striking features, including its steep Tudor roofline, intricate gables and classic red brick facade.
Adjacent to the living area lies a sun-drenched solarium, a quaint breakfast room-turned-intimate seating area and a formal dining space, complete with French doors.
The kitchen, connected to the dining room, boasts black cabinets contrasting with a tan brick backsplash, professional-grade stainless steel appliances, and a center island with bar seating and a vegetable washing sink.
The second floor houses four bedrooms, including JonBenét’s former room, which boasts private balcony access. Additionally, a game room with a spacious terrace and a full bathroom offer ample entertainment space.
The listing highlights the home’s pièce de résistance: a sprawling 1,141-square-foot “penthouse primary suite” occupying the entire top floor.
The listing was repped by Jeffery Erickson and Ryan McIntosh of LIV Sotheby’s International Real Estate.
The Post has reached out for comment.
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The housing issue has become a trend among mountain towns and resort communities across the nation.
Chad – stock.adobe.com
It’s good work, if you can get housing.
Despite offering a six-figure salary, Colorado’s Steamboat Springs is struggling to hire someone to oversee the town’s human resources and risk management — because the municipality’s housing is so expensive.
So far, two candidates have turned down the $167,000-a-year job due to housing costs, both unable to find an affordable place to live in the approximately 13,000-person community, NBC News reported.
It’s not an issue isolated to that position, either. Sky-high real estate prices have forced Steamboat Ski Resort to lease a hotel for its employees to stay in — the properties they used to rent now increasingly available only as tourist-targeted short-term rentals.
“Houses used to be for employees and hotels for guests. Now houses are for guests and hotels are for employee housing,” the resort’s director of communications, Loryn Duke, told NBC.
The situation also forces a certain transience on those who work in the remote area, which is famous for being an Olympic athlete training ground, even if they would like to live there full-time.
“We have a lot of great staff who are early in their careers or have young families, but they just aren’t able to put down those roots,” Duke added.
It’s a problem that’s become increasingly common for small American cities like Steamboat Springs in recent years.
“I know that it’s so hard for folks outside of mountain or resort communities to even wrap their heads around, but housing is just so through the roof that unless you’re extremely wealthy, it’s unattainable,” Margaret Bowes, executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns, told NBC.
Steamboat Springs, however, managed to stay relatively affordable even as similar municipalities watched their real estate markets become prohibitively pricey as second-home buyers, rental investors and remote worker transplants swooped in.
It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that Steamboat Springs, too, fell victim to the trend.
“Steamboat has always been known as a cowboy ski town. It’s real authentic,” Steamboat City Manager Gary Suiter told NBC. “And the real estate prices had not gotten crazy like everywhere else. Well, that ended with the pandemic.”
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- The 13,000-person mountain town is dealing with an 80 percent increase in the average price of a single-family home
- Even high-earners are now being priced out of home ownership, which has left local institutions like, the hospital, struggling to retain staff
A Colorado ski resort billed as a playground for wealthy elites and Olympians-in-training has become so exclusive the locals who help run it are being priced out of the housing market.
Steamboat Springs draws tens of thousands of visitors every year thanks to its trademarked Champagne Snow powder and quaint charm.
But despite a $200 million investment to make it the state’s second-largest ski resort after Vail, many locals are being left out in the cold.
And it’s all thanks to the red-hot Airbnb market catering to vacationers and influencers that has taken over the housing industry.
The housing crisis is so serious in the 13,000-people city, that the local hospital is losing job candidates left and right due to the surging real estate market.
The small mountain town, about a three-hour drive from Denver, cannot find a head of human resources for the city because the offered $167,000 salary will no longer put anyone in a position to buy a house in the area.
The self-described cowboy ski resort has been known primarily as an area where aspiring winter Olympians come to train among the salt-of-the-Earth locals who are by-and-large middle-income professionals.
That reputation stood in semi-stark comparison to other, more glamorous ski towns like Vail, Aspen, Jackson Hole and Sun Valley.
But a cash injection from owners Alterra Mountain Company has now cemented it as a world-renowned destination. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are among the roughly 42 percent of out-of-towners who own property in the area.
In 2008, the resort trademarked Champagne Snow to describe its fluffy powder, a phrase likely coined by rancher Joe McElroy as a way to describe the way the snow would shoot up his nose while carving the slopes.
Visitors have reported paying as much as $280 for ski lift passes, making Steamboat Springs one of the most expensive resorts in the state.
But it appears to be locals who are paying the true cost. Doctors willing to put down more than $1million on a house are repeatedly outbid by out-of-town buyers putting down all-cash, over-asking price offers.
According to an NBC report, the city’s local ski resort has been leasing a hotel for its employees to live in because the homes they were once able to rent are now mostly on the market as expensive, short-term rentals for visitors.
Loryn Duke, the Steamboat ski resort’s director of communications, told the outlet: ‘Houses used to be for employees and hotels for guests. Now houses are for guests and hotels are for employee housing. We have a lot of great staff who are early in their careers or have young families, but they just aren’t able to put down those roots.’
‘I know that it’s so hard for folks outside of mountain or resort communities to even wrap their heads around, but housing is just so through the roof that unless you’re extremely wealthy, it’s unattainable,’ said Margaret Bowes, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns.
Steamboat, as well as other mountain towns and formerly quaint travel destinations across the American Southwest, have been smacked by the pandemic-fueled real estate explosion.
Remote workers, short-term rental investors, and second-home buyers have swept in and caused home prices to essentially double with no sign they will fall anytime soon.
In Steamboat, local officials are attempting to ease the strain by proposing building thousands of new housing units on a 534-acre ranch that the city’s housing authority purchased with an anonymous $24million donation.
In phases, the office wants to build more than 2,200 units. Sale and rentals of the properties would be restricted to those who live locally on a fulltime basis and meet certain income requirements.
Even residents who are opposed to the project, believing it to be too large-scale a project for a city with limited infrastructure, understand that the housing issue is a real one.
Since 2020, single-family home prices in Steamboat have increased by 80 percent to, on average, $1.8million. For already existing homeowners, their property taxes have shot up, on average, by 86 percent.
Those numbers put even starter-home ownership out of reach for anyone making less than $200,000 annually, and even for that tier of income earner, the home prices make taking high-paying jobs in the area unattractive.
A local realtor for the past two decades told NBC: ‘We are seeing across all segments of the market even high-paid professionals, they’re turning down jobs because they spend a little time looking at housing costs and they can’t do it.
‘The people who are coming here are paying a million dollars for an entry-level house – a totally entry-level, 50-year-old house.’
Leah Wood, president of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, told the Steamboat Pilot the town had affordable housing units at the end of last year all with 100 percent occupancy.
She added the combined waiting list for the properties is around 800 people.
The president of the local hospital, Soniya Fidler said that ‘no income earner is immune’ from the insane housing prices.
‘I think that probably every week there’s someone who comes back and tells me we lost someone because of housing,’ she said.
The hospital, in order to stop bleeding staff and potentially beckon professionals to fill positions, some of which have been open for two years, has gone into the residential real estate field.
The institution is currently building 42 apartments that will rent at rates no higher than about 30 percent of the given hospital employee’s income.
‘It is hard because we are here to deliver health care, we’re not here to deliver houses. Usually, if we have the dollars to spend, it is on state-of-the-art equipment and upgrading our facilities,’ said Fidler.
‘But we don’t want to have to close services, especially because we can’t staff for it.’
Wood estimates that Steamboat Springs would need around 1,400 more units to house the local workforce.
On Facebook, a housing group for the town is inundated with tenants seeking a place to live often up to three or four months in advance of their move-in date.
Professional golf teacher Luis Gaspar lived in the city for six years before deciding to relocate.
He said when he first moved he found a one-bedroom apartment at Torian Plum Condominiums for $1,100 a month.
‘Two years after that, it was $2,300 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment,’ Gaspar told the Steamboat Pilot. ‘That is a more than 100 percent increase in two years.
‘Unless you have a really good salary in Steamboat, which is really hard to find because everything is a service job, it’s impossible. ‘That is why I had to leave. The community is great and everything, but I am working two, three jobs, 12 hours a day, just to make it by.’
In 2022, Steamboat Springs followed in the footsteps of many other tourist hotspots including New York and Lake Tahoe to bring in restrictions on short term lets in a bid to ease the housing crunch.
However opponents to bans have pointed out they just give rise to a black market for short term rentals and do little to stop wealthier individuals from purchasing second homes that remain vacant.
The Denver Zoo and Downtown Aquarium Denver are now home to more animals in the wake of the closure of SeaQuest Littleton earlier this month.
“We’re fortunate to have the space, resources and animal health and care expertise to provide the best possible care for these animals,” Bert Vescolani, the Denver Zoo’s president and CEO, said in a news release, “and (the zoo is) happy we could assist in this coordinated effort to give them a great new home.”
The “animals are getting acquainted with their new habitats” and “will be viewable to guests and members soon,” the zoo said. The animals, including a keel-billed toucan, red-necked wallabies, African pancake tortoises, a New Guinea blue-tongued skink and many others, are being monitored and evaluated at the zoo’s Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Animal Hospital and its Tropical Discovery.
SeaQuest is a national aquarium business that allows visitors to interact with its aquatic and non-aquatic animals. People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, also known as PETA, has criticized the company for several years.
SeaQuest Littleton, in unincorporated Jefferson County, was one of eight company locations in the U.S. The Littleton venue had received multiple local citations and complaints.
Colorado Community Media reported that SeaQuest Littleton’s Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife license was suspended in 2019. At that time, the aquarium was required to remove roughly two dozen species of fish, birds and mammals that fall under CPW’s definition of wildlife, totaling roughly 200 animals. The aquarium replaced the removed animals with others that didn’t fall under the CPW licensing umbrella.
Following the suspension, SeaQuest did not apply for a license, a CPW spokesperson told Colorado Community Media in a story reporting on the aquarium’s recent closure. As a result, SeaQuest Littleton had not held a CPW license since 2019.
Several recent inspection reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed non-compliant issues at the aquarium. Examples include inadequate handling or control of animals during public interactions, unsupervised public interaction with animals, enclosure disrepair, animal injuries, insufficient sanitation and failure to document medication delivery.
A company statement on Facebook did not say specifically why SeaQuest Littleton closed, but said it will continue its operations in “states that support (its) interactive business model.”
The Denver Zoo has taken in about 130 SeaQuest animals. Some of the rehomed creatures are new species to the zoo.
“We have a number of rescued animals living here at the zoo and take the responsibility of bringing in these animals very seriously,” Vescolani said in the news release.
The Denver Zoo is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and is home to about 3,000 animals.