Getting your player ready...
The lifts won’t open for weeks yet at Ski Granby Ranch, the family-friendly resort 20 minutes beyond Winter Park in Grand County; but chances to buy one of four final ski-in/ski-out condos right beside the lifts will likely be distant memories by then. If you want into a ski experience remarkably popular with the Front Range families that have bought there, you need to head up there now.
“It’s proven to be a very, very popular place,” says Base Camp One’s developer, Greg Finch of Dundee Resort Development. “Imagine that we’ve sold 60 homes during what were very tough conditions in the mountain market, yet we saw only one foreclosure and three resales – two of which were families buying up to larger Base Camp One units.” Those owner families are obviously using Base Camp One to the max, Finch says: “We can tell how much by the cars in the parking lot, and by how often we have to restock the woodpile for the firepit,” he adds. Users aren’t just skiing from Base Camp One; it’s their jumping-off point for hiking/mountain-biking forays during summer; for taking out-of-town visitors for trips up to Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Lake; and to fish the Fraser River during fall. “Granby Ranch is really coming into its own,” says Dale Schossow with Fuller Sotheby’s, exclusive agents for Base Camp One. “What I like about it is that it’s unpretentious, it’s affordable and it’s a one-stop – a place we can ski, golf, hike and bike. You can’t do that in Summit County, not from the door of your own place.” Meanwhile, Fuller Sotheby’s is seeing a faster pace of sales in Granby Ranch this fall, at a time when the resort and other areas of Grand County have too few homes for interested buyers. “Supply is our biggest issue now; there’s virtually no inventory,” he adds. “Builders stopped building in ’09, and as the market recovers there’s no inventory for consumers. I’m trying to get builders to do new vertical, but it takes some time.” Finch says that creates a one-time opportunity now for those final four Base Camp One homes, from $159,900; 2-bedrooms from $257,500. “Once it’s sold out, there’s nowhere for prices to go but up,” he adds. The center of that opportunity, Finch says, is for Front Range families, living under two hours from Base Camp One – by far the largest buyer profile of current residents, practically all of them with young kids and grandkids. Kids get a ski experience at Granby Ranch that offers better chances to learn the sport, with new terrain parks and lots of opportunity to make friends. Owners get to know other Base Camp One owners – around the firepit, and over après-ski evenings at Granby Ranch Grill, 25 yards from their condos. On the mountain above and around them are the other amenities that come packaged into Granby Ranch’s community club membership: the 18-hole Golf Granby Ranch course; biking/hiking trails through the open space of the 5,000-acre community; fishing on the river; and The Ranch community center with new pool and hot tub. Schossow adds another advantage over areas further west in Summit and Vail: no trip through the Eisenhower Tunnel. To visit Base Camp One while those four homes are available – quite possibly your last chance to buy new ski-in ski-out residences at those prices anywhere in Colorado – from I-70 take U.S. 40 west, 15 miles past Winter Park to Village Road (before the light) and turn right 2 miles to Granby Ranch Real Estate Center.Follow Mark Samuelson on Twitter:
@marksamuelson
