April News

It's incredibly quiet here as usual for this time of year. The only people walking the streets outside my Vail Village offices are construction workers for Solaris and the mailman. Once in a while the door will squeak open and the Brokers will stand up as though Warren Buffet just walked in and, lo and behold, it's just another Broker coming back from lunch.

But that doesn't mean our business has quieted down much. In fact, we're very busy putting together deal after deal these days. And it really was a much better winter in regards to sales than I expected.

In the first Quarter of 2010 we sold $28M as a company. That’s $6M more than in all of 2009. As of today, we have $15M under contract and we are just beginning to build our summer transactions now. So overall, I am hopeful my company can more than quadruple 2009. If that occurs, we will be at about half of what we did during the peak of 2007 ($194M). But in this market, half would be more than fine with me!

We heard some interesting news today - that the Four Seasons developer, an affiliate of Barclay's Bank called Vail Development 09, LLC has sued the engineer for $12M claiming the engineer did not report structural weaknesses. There are rumors the floors have settled up to 4 inches in places. The big fear is they will have to tear the building down and start over again. Even if they don't end up having to tear it down, they have announced they will not be closing in June as planned. In fact, they have no idea when they will close as major mitigation will have to take place to make the building structurally sound. Originally this project was supposed to close in 2008 (after initial excavation began in 2005). But a 9 month break in construction activity caused by the original developer defaulting on the loan set closing back to this June. And now, no one knows if the building will even be standing in 6 months.

On a good note, the weather has been beautiful the last two days after we received a foot of snow over the weekend! And the forecast shows intermittent snow for the next four days. Typical Spring in the Rockies!

It's a great time to come visit Vail (despite the weather). Most of the better restaurants are open and offering 50% off the bill. And you don't need to make reservations. In fact you can pick your table. How often do you get to do that during Christmas break? People are already hiking and mountain biking and even still skiing at Arapahoe Basin (I went yesterday - the snow was perfect).