Real estate agents in Durango and La Plata County have had to adapt to a new fast-paced landscape ever since the pandemic upset the market in April 2020.
Lois Surmi, president of the board of directors for the Durango Area Association of Realtors, said the local market is something she’s never seen in her 27 years as a broker.
“This is a whole new world to us right now,” she said.
Houses are being bought as fast as they are placed on the market, Surmi said, and the lack of inventory increases demand and the amounts buyers are willing to pay for a home.
She said the home sellers are running the market. If you’re a real estate agent and you have a seller, then you know that you have a sale. She called being a seller’s agent in Durango these days a “dream job.”
But buyer’s agents might be living something slightly closer to a nightmare. If you are a buyer’s agent, you have to work three times as hard as you used to.
“You have to be on your game if you’re working for buyers trying to find them something,” Surmi said.
The rate that homes are being bought is so rapid that prospective out-of-state buyers will move on an opportunity before they’ve had a chance to visit the property in person. If they don’t like the property, “they will terminate the contract and then it goes back on the market,” she said.
The Durango Area Association of Realtors released third-quarter market data that shows prices in almost all segments of the housing market have shot up since last year.
Median prices in the category of “La Plata Country Homes” and “In Town” residential properties were up over $100,000 even though the number of “In Town” units sold is down.
Properties are bought as soon as they hit the market, but that doesn’t happen automatically. Real estate agents and listing agents are working with buyers and sellers to make sure those deals occur.
So what’s it like working in an environment as fast-paced as the current Durango real estate market?
For Durango real estate agent Todd Sieger, the mid-pandemic housing boom is the most stress-inducing market he has ever navigated.
Sieger, who has been in real estate for more than 20 years, said he is finding today’s market more stressful than the 2008 recession, which was defined by the collapse of the housing market.
Sieger said he obtained his real estate license around 2000, so he was still relatively new to the scene when the housing market collapsed in 2008. He said that while Durango wasn’t hit as hard by the crash as areas such as Southern California, Florida and Phoenix, there was still a huge lull in sales and the stress of not much income, plus a lot of downtime.
But right now, he said real estate agents are faced with the opposite problem: Properties sell so fast that there is a mad dash from buyers making offers on anything that becomes available.
“We kind of say it to each other jokingly, but there’s a lot of brokers that say, ‘I just wish it was like 2019 again,’” said Sieger, with Coldwell Banker Distinctive Properties of Durango.
The 2019 market was healthy with reasonable prices and inventory.
Sieger said when the real estate business started moving again after the pandemic started, the market became something that he’d never seen before. He said some of the offers he’s seen are “just insane” with how high people are willing to offer above asking price – real estate agents are seeing multiple offers on properties that are 10% above the asking price.
In the early 2000s when Sieger was just getting into real estate, he said Aspen, Telluride, Steamboat Springs and similar places were the hot markets. People from the eastern United States were buying properties in those towns then. In Durango, the predominant out-of-state buyers were coming from California, and Texas to a lesser extent.
Today, Sieger said he’s talked to more buyers from Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston in the last 18 months than he had in the previous 20 years.
He attributed it to urban flight caused by the pandemic.
He said Durangoans take for granted the wide-open spaces the area offers. He said that during mass quarantines and stay-at-home periods, locals here weren’t locked up in 30-story apartment buildings.
“I know people who rented a car and just started driving west,” he said. “Maybe they ended up in Durango, somewhere in Wyoming, Montana. Even South Dakota. Some of those markets are doing exceptionally well.”
Sieger said people started finding those rural places in the West where the open space made them feel safe during the pandemic.
If people could work remotely, they did while visiting Durango on their escape from the city. Some of those visitors, Sieger said, fell in love with the area.
“And I’ve dealt with tons of people over the years, that they’ll come here on vacation and they’ll fall in love like everybody does,” he said.
In the past, such people might grow fond of the idea of moving to Durango, but then realize they’d have to leave behind their six-figure salaries because they couldn’t find work locally that offered as much pay.
That problem is somewhat a thing of the past with remote work becoming a new norm because of the pandemic, Sieger said. Now, those people can bring their jobs with them. Oftentimes, people moving from the city find that they have an extra couple of hours of free time during the day, too, that used to be spent on commuting.
Social media is a conduit for a lot of free advertising. New homeowners in the area share pictures of their homes or the town or the mountains, their friends and family see the pictures and decide they want to move out here, too, Sieger said.
In the old market, if a house went up for sale, it could sit on the market for several weeks, several months, or even a year or longer, Sieger said. In those days, the key to catching a buyer’s eye was to keep marketing materials for the property somewhat fresh.
Sieger would write up a description of the property and have professional photographs of the property taken. If the unit didn’t sell after a few months, then new photos might be taken or the property description might be approached from a different angle.
“Now, it’s like, let’s just get this on the market as fast as we can,” he said. “But, then we spend a lot more time sorting through offers.”
Sieger said that these days, he might have five to 10 offers on a single listing. He lays all the offers out in a spreadsheet to weigh their pros and cons “because not all offers are created equally.”
He still has professional photos taken of properties and he still does write-ups for them, but he hasn’t had to approach marketing from a new angle lately because everything sells so quickly.
He said it’s normal for the market to slow down heading into winter, but as long as it stays somewhat warm, houses can sell. The only problem is that there’s nothing to sell.
Real estate marketing used to be a time-consuming process, but a low-stress one. Now, instead of spending as much time on the marketing side of things, agents are jumping on offers as soon as they receive them. Sometimes, that means putting off their personal lives.
“So if they (the seller) say we want to put it on the market on Friday and you had plans to go camping on Saturday and Sunday with your family, cancel those plans,” Sieger said. “Cause you need to be available to answer questions.”
If an agent gets five offers on a listing, he said, they can’t just tell the buyers that they’ll get back to them.
“Those buyers want an answer now, because if there’s another property they might move on that,” he said. “And you just need to get it wrapped up and get everybody on the same page.”
Sieger said Distinctive Property’s clients have high expectations that the agents will return their emails, texts and phone calls right away. He said that timing is key, but at the same time, agents such as Sieger are people, too.
“We need our downtime, our time away, our time with our family,” he said. “We need our vacations.”
Planning those vacations or family time can be a tricky thing to do in a fast-paced market such as Durango’s.
“You might say we’re going to go camping over the Fourth of July weekend,” Sieger said. “But June 28 you get a call from somebody that says, ‘Hey, we want you to list our house next week.’
“Do you cancel your camping trip with your family or do you turn that listing down? It’s income, it’s our job. That’s a tough balance and it’s taken its toll on a lot of people, a lot of Realtors over the past couple years.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
