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At some point in time, the best season to sell real estate in Aspen changed from winter, when the slopes are packed, to summer, when the ski mountain’s dales are less a destination than a beguiling distraction that floats above the dining, shopping and festivals going on below. “The secret of Aspen,” says Coldwell Banker veteran agent Brian Hazen, “is that it’s a community that has also become a resort. The competitors are resorts that are trying to become communities.”

Sure enough, as some agents in Vail and Beaver Creek report rising prices but slackening sales, Aspen is seeing steady growth in what is already one of the glitziest priced markets anywhere: inventory down year-over-year 14 percent, and purchases up 16 percent.

Hazen has done nothing to lessen that pace: Early last month he posted what probably ranks as third highest sale in the town’s history, $41 million combined price for Jigsaw Ranch, 67 treed acres above Castle Creek where spectacular homes of sellers George and Mark Rosenthal of Santa Monica-based Raleigh Enterprises are perched in the forest, linked by a footbridge over a creek.

The record sale in Pitkin County dates from well before the 2009 drop-off; and what Aspen is NOT doing, Hazen says, is soaring past that high-water mark. But that, he adds, is just fine.

“I don’t like rapid appreciation,” says Hazen, vice president/broker associate at Mason Morse Real Estate, with offices on Hyman Street in the core of Aspen’s Victorian-era shopping. “When you don’t have big supply-demand problems, the protection on the downside is much better.” Real estate agents now quip that Glitter Gulch was “last in, first out” of the recession, maintaining its sparkle with prices that bottomed out in 2009-10, and then gathered luster.

Supply always will be limited: When Hazen moved there in 1972, the town was already battling over development, culminating in 1977 when Aspen and Pitkin County limited growth to 3.47 percent per year along lines of similar an initiative by Petaluma, Calif. But land in Pitkin County was already constricted: 85 percent of its rugged terrain is held by the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Meanwhile, other factors now spur demand. Unlike previous recovery scenarios, Hazen notes, the primary markets that fuel Aspen’s sales are in better shape, not just Denver and Boulder, but Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Meanwhile, the summer market that came to surpass the ski season market a decade or so ago feeds a stream of well-heeled buyers who may never click into a pair of skis.

The old refrain, Hazen says, was that buyers “came for the skiing and stayed for the summers.” But the summer magic works particularly in the broker’s favor. “It’s lighter longer, and the summer season almost runs as long as ski season now,” he adds. “In winter people are skiing and you have to show property after 5 p.m. when it’s dark.”

That longer sales day had its beginnings in 1949, three years after the first lift began running, when corporate executive/ski developer Walter Paepcke and wife Elizabeth staged a summer festival around the 200th birthday of poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and launched the Aspen Music Festival. A year later Paepcke, trustee of the University of Chicago, created the ‘Aspen Institute’ to promote “open-minded dialogue on contemporary issues.”

This week, 1,250 visitors joined the dialogue at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival, paying $2,800 each ($2,550 for members) to hear everybody from Karl Rove to Madeleine Albright, along with innovative thinkers in design, arts and sciences. Under CEO writer/biographer Walter Isaacson, the Institute’s mid-century-modern campus beside the Music Tent has seen a major renovation – even its 1952 geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller, now rendered into a planetarium where Festival goers watched interactive shows about deep space.

“The Ideas Festival exposes Aspen to people who wouldn’t normally come,” says Hazen, who himself is involved in the Aspen Education Foundation and Aspen Historical Society. The campus is also epicenter of the town’s ‘West End,’ where home prices defy gravity – one 6-bedroom beside the Institute listed by Mason Morse at $12,950,000.

“I have one rule,” Hazen adds. “I don’t worry about prices. I want people to come here and spend time, experience the quality of life, and the rest follows.”

WHERE: Aspen Ideas Festival, concluding its 10th year, imaginative leaders & thinkers, held annually at Aspen Meadows Conference Center.

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WHERE: Coldwell Banker Mason Morse, serving Aspen, Snowmass, Carbondale, Basalt, Glenwood Springs. Brian Hazen, vice president.

ADDRESS: 514 E. Hyman Ave.

PHONE: 970-920-7395

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Mark Samuelson writes on real estate and business; you can email him at mark@samuelsonassoc.com.
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