colorado homes and lifestyle's august issue
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Featuring Scott FranklundTRANSCRIPT
By Mark Samuelson
It was June, and Boulder-based Coldwell Banker agent
Scott Franklund had already broken past the whopping
$40 million in sales he’d posted for the entire year
of 2012. But one of those purchases struck him as
particularly poignant: For $4.9 million, a 43-year-old
Silicon Valley CEO had closed on a Boulder resale that
he had no plans to occupy for at least two years. “He’s
placed it with a management company,” Franklund said
over lunch at Twenty Ninth Street Mall, adding that the
client also has an agreement with the tech firm he’s
chaired, not to leave California before 2015.
list at $2.3 million – after eight rapid showings and
two offers – up from an estimated $1.4 million at the
start of the 2008-09 downturn. Any future expansion
of a home in unincorporated areas is hemmed in by
ordinance to a max of 6,000 square feet depending on
surrounding development. Heading northeast from
the airport across a landscape dotted with farms and
newer subdivisions, Franklund shows how this unfolds
to consumers: Landowners get compensated for
‘transferable development rights’ – TDRs – in exchange
for turning land over to open space. Buyers, meanwhile,
may be able to buy credits to build bigger.
Buyers clamoring for the Boulder lifestyle will do about anything to get it; even pay now for a home they won’t be able to occupy for years
A Space Race in Boulder County
Coldwell Banker Previews agent Scott Franklund shows a new listing near Niwot at $2.795 million
A recent sale by Scott Franklund at $4.750 million
“He knows there’ll be nothing like it here by
then,” Franklund added. “It’s not about what
it is; it’s about what it could be.”
The market that urges such frenzied moves
is the product of too many buyers chasing
too few homes and lots, in a county with a
program controlling 97,000 acres of open
space, while seeking more. “There’s just a
handful of developable lots left,” he added.
In addition to the supply-demand dynamic,
that system tends to generate premium prices for what
Franklund calls ‘beachfront lots’
like the one under contract to the
Silicon Valley CEO, backing to the
open space perimeter.
“It’s exponential,” he said, noting
that sales volume in Boulder
County’s luxury market is up
around 55% year-over-year, with
prices running 25% higher. That
puts a larger, semi-custom home
in a mixed-quality subdivision near
Boulder’s old airport on his ‘sold’ Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall
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