Steamboat Real Estate Home Search and Blog

When buying Steamboat Springs real estate, many buyers look to price per square foot to gauge a property’s value. How accurate is $/sq. ft. when it comes to evaluating Steamboat real estate? Even within the same development, there are variables like lot size, remodeling, landscaping, and finishes that make price-per-square-foot an inadequate comparison tool.

In Steamboat Springs, location is one of the prime factors. Ski-in, ski-out properties will always command a premium price because they are in high demand and the supply is very limited.

Other details like a home’s floor plan, the year a home was built, and the overall quality of construction and quality of finishes influence how much the home is worth. Price-per-square-foot is one measure, but it certainly isn’t the most important.

Here are some active listings to illustrate this point:

This condo in the Sheraton (read here how the Sheraton is switching to timeshares) is basically a hotel room with a kitchenette. It is listed at $1,183/square foot…………. while this log home on the mountain

is listed at $408/square foot. Both have been on the market for almost the same number of days, but comparisons stop there.

Of course, this is an extreme–if not absurd–comparison, but one that illustrates the point that comparison based on price-per-square-foot is inaccurate when you are comparing only a few properties.

So how can you use price-per-square-foot effectively? Look at the trends. One way is to use the median and mean price per square foot for a development, then compare an individual property to the median. You can see if the one you are interested in is above (or better yet) below the median $/sq. ft.

The other way is to look at $/sq. ft. trends stretching over months and years to see which direction the property values are heading.