aspen real estate --the pain the pain

So Aspen is different.  My son has met at least 3 kids at camp whose families have their own jets.  He saw one of them taking off today on the way to camp and he said thank goodness that kid was a @%$^^$XS.

Ok so I knew going into this that Aspen real estate was wicked expensive.  But that is not what this post is about.  And for all you  real estate agents reading you may hate me for this but I got to be honest---there is some stinky shit going on here.  Namely no one seems to be able to tell you anything about the properties in terms of what you can build, how big you can build and what the fees are to build there.  Now I guess if you are so rich that you don't care about fees, and if you spend a lot of money only to find you can't build the home you want and then you have to sell well maybe losing 300k-800k doesn't affect you but that isn't my world.

I would expect the seller of a piece of land to be able to provide you something that would say how big a home you could build on that piece of land and all the details around that.  But it seems in Aspen no one really knows what you can build till you go to the review board.  Also jurisdiction seems all over the road (which impacts various additional costs like affording housing tax fee which is close to $50 a square foot--yea you read that right but for those of you not so good with math if you are building a 4k square foot house you are looking at $200k in affordable housing tax fee alone).  Other permitting costs can run another $50 a square foot in the city so you are looking at $100 in fees per square foot.  There are many places in this country you can build a house for less than $100 a square foot.  Fck.

And no one is upfront about which property is located where.

So you see a property and think humm nice then you have to try to figure out where it's really located, guess what you can build on it and pray.

My old formula for building a home was

land+ (building cost x1.33% + 50% longer to deliver) + 3% of building costs as fees

my new formula is

land + (building which is 20% smaller than you thought you could build once you go through approval process) + ( building costs which are double the rest of the world x 1.33% + 50% longer to deliver) + 18% building costs as fees

BOTTOM LINE  real estate is softening.  There have been 14 homes sold in Aspen this year so far --off like 70% YTD from last year.  Very little is moving and prices are dropping.  Maybe it's time to bring some sanity to this process not just in terms of price but process as well.  Clearing up this muddy picture would improve transaction rates which would be good for the local economy.