Durango’s official kick-off to Summer is here! Taste of Durango will be held on Sunday, 5/19, from 11am to 3pm. Enjoy food and beverage samples from many of Durango’s delicious restaurants and breweries as you peruse Main street.
Get more information here: Taste of Durango
Durango an adventure-sports capital? Go in April and you’ll see why. Within an hour of town, you can ski spring corn, nordic-ski around an alpine lake, kayak the Animas River, catch fat trout, hike a thirteener, ride 10,000-foot passes on a dizzy-making scenic byway, and mountain-bike blue-ribbon singletrack.
Housing starts in March rose to the highest level in five years. If developers keep building at that rate, there’d be one million new houses by the end of the year.
So, what are builders building and what kind of homes do consumers want? The granite countertop of the new kitchen is like the leather interior of a new car — a standard, special order must-have.
Kira Sterling, chief marketing officer for Toll Brothers, a custom home builder, says buyers want kitchens that look semi-professional and bathrooms that could rival a spa. “They are spending a lot of money in the kitchen, and in the master bath,” she says.
There is a bright spot in Friday’s overall gloomy jobs report: construction jobs are growing more than twice as fast as the overall employment rate.
And most of those workers are building new homes, helping revitalize the residential housing market.
Overall, the March jobs report came well below expectations, with 88,000 jobs added to private and public payrolls, with the unemployment rate dropping one notch to 7.6 percent.
t’s still a buyers market, but buyers soon will be hard-pressed to find a home as inventory in the county decreases to the lowest rate in five or six years.
That was the message at the 13th annual Real Estate Forecast on Wednesday night.
Inventory is down nationwide, and Durango is far below the six-month supply that real estate experts consider economically healthy.
As inventory decreases and demand increases, the median home price also will go up. It’s expected to increase 5 to 7 percent in the county and about 10 percent in Colorado. If that bears out, it would be the first time home prices have gone up in the county since 2006.
The good news is the real estate market looks better than it has at any time in last five years, said Bob Allen, owner of Allen & Associates, a real estate appraisal, consultant and research firm.
These ten North American ski towns may not have the name recognition of the world’s best-known destinations, but that’s just fine with them. These are the local’s favorites, the up-and-comers. They’re real towns, often cheaper and friendlier than the big dogs—at least for now. If you’re on the hunt for great skiing without the crowds and glitz, read on.
New home sales surged in January, rising almost 16% from December in another sign of an improving housing market.
House prices increased 6.8% in December compared with December 2011, the biggest year-over-year gain in six years, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index. Higher demand and shrinking inventory drove the increase.
U.S. home resales shot up to their highest level in a year and a half in January, driving the inventory of unsold properties down to its smallest number in nearly seven years, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales jumped 4.3%, to 4.57 million units, the biggest annual rate since May 2010, the trade group reported.
