Jim and Beth Stormont picked a ski town the way you'd run a clinical trial: 10 days in Crested Butte, 10 days in Breckenridge. Jim, as he told the Journal's Sarah Paynter, found Breckenridge too theme-park — "like Disney in the mountains." Crested Butte had no stoplight, no chain restaurant and less than a square mile inside its limits. The Atlanta couple — he's a hospitality developer in his 60s — chose the quiet one, and in 2024 put about $6.3 million into building a five-bedroom compound of roughly 5,300 square feet just past the town line. They're there nearly half the year now. Friday's Mansion cover is about what's happened to that town since the rest of the world found it.
The short version: Vail Resorts (MTN) bought the Crested Butte Mountain Resort ski area in 2018, and skiers who'd never been started showing up; the pandemic added more outdoor types and pushed up home prices. The town can't stretch to meet them. It had 1,639 residents in 2020, sits 20 miles from Aspen as the crow flies but 100 by road, was incorporated in 1880, keeps strict limits on demolitions and new building, and much of the land around it is preserved. Scarce land, rising demand: agent Jesse Ebner puts the upper Gunnison Valley's median sale price this year at about $1.23 million, up about 23% from the same stretch of last year and double 2019.
What's arriving is a different weight class. Channing Boucher of LIV Sotheby's International Realty says the newcomers' build budgets run $12 million to $17 million, plunge pools and home oxygenation systems included. Listing agent Diane Aronovic of Bluebird Real Estate has an estate outside town, asked at $25 million, under contract — a local record if it closes. Ebner says sales there usually top out around $12 million. "The wealth factor has completely changed," Boucher says. The cover house, Jason Thumlert and Lindley Bain's ski-in, ski-out place on Mount Crested Butte, sits on a lot that cost about $615,000 and took about $5 million to build. And William Elfarr, a 59-year-old Texas urologist, and his wife, Barbara, paid $5.85 million in May for a renovated 5,450-square-foot house about 10 miles south of town — bought, he says, partly as an investment. "What it gives me is diversification," he said. Hold that thought.
The line item nobody priced
Not everyone's thrilled. Some locals worry about losing the small-town charm, Boucher says, and local homeowner Bob Colvey says others grumble about weekend partying and the sheer number of short-term rentals. AirDNA counted about 1,150 short-term-rental listings around Crested Butte in September, nearly 50% more than in the same stretch of 2018 — eight years of growth, not one. And the town's own website says it's considering a new tax on non-primary residences. Considering: the paper prints no rate and no timetable. Dane Tucker, 56, who built on the mountain in 2023, says the mood toward second-home owners has soured since the pandemic; he gives to local causes and overtips. Ben and Kate Towill did it the careful way — left Charleston's summers behind, rented first, then paid $3.45 million in August for a 3,300-square-foot log home above downtown. Their kids bike to school and ski on winter Wednesdays instead of gym.
Our read
Housing (M6), with a Tax footnote and an Investments/Risk (IN04) correction. Start with Dr. Elfarr's word, diversification. One house in one valley, bought after a 23% year, isn't diversification; it's concentration with a hot tub. No knock on the purchase — summers and fly fishing are honest reasons to own a mountain house — but the investment label belongs on the part of the balance sheet that's actually spread out. The Stormonts and the Towills got the method right: test-drive or rent before you buy. What nobody on this page priced out loud is the carrying cost. A second home's taxes and rental rules are set by people who don't own one — here, a town weighing a levy aimed at exactly this kind of house, and locals tired of weekend parties. The rental income has competition, too: listings are up nearly 50% since 2018. If the budget only works with rental income, the budget depends on a vote you don't get.
So: Hold, and for anyone pricing a second home, treat the tax and the rental rules as variables, not constants, and run the numbers once with the rental income at zero. Read the town website before the listing. You don't wait for the first snow to learn whether the roof holds; the review is where you check it in October.