Housing Prices in Southwest Colorado
Since real estate is one of my favorite topics, I couldn’t miss the chance to add my two cents along with some other recent blog posts about how much house you can get for $150,000, $250,000, or $1 million. Make sure to check out these other areas if you missed them.
Portland: Frugal Portland
New York: Broke and Beautiful Life
Denver: Shop My Closet Project
Silicon Valley: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
New Jersey: Red Debted Stepchild
Central Indiana: Club Thrifty
Aukland: NZ Muse
Guatemala: Reach Financial Independence
Colorado Housing Prices
Southwest Colorado is a bargain in my opinion. That’s one reason why we live here. It’s rural, so if you’re looking for big city excitement, it’s no where to be found. You can, however, enjoy an outdoor paradise with mountain or desert terrain. Take your pick or do both on the same day if you’d like!
With the money we save by living here, we can take a weekend road trip to the city when we feel the need. Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City are all less than 8 hours away, and we can be in LA in 12 hours.
Colorado is all over the map as far as real estate prices. Even in our area you’d be hard pressed to find a nice home in Durango for under $350,000, and if you want a single family home in Telluride, you’ll need over a million. Don’t even get me started on places like Vail and Aspen. I’d rather make my money go further, and that’s easy to do where we live. Here’s what it costs to buy a house near Cortez, Colorado.
$100,000
You can still buy houses for $100,000 or less if you do some searching. They will be small or need lots of work. These are the type of properties that can make excellent rentals. In fact, we are considering this property for ourselves. It’s a duplex listed for $92,000. The main house is an 800 sq foot, 2 bed one bath, and there is a 300 sq foot studio in the back.
$150,000
For $145,000 you can get this 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom 1150 square foot house right in the best part of town. I did find some larger ones in this price range, but the location of this house beats the others hands down. It looks like a few things could be updated, and the kitchen is certainly from the 90’s, but it’s basically move in ready.
$250,000-$300,000
In the $250k-$300k range, there were lots of choices. You can have a big house in town or a house in the country with some land if that makes you happy. This 5 bedroom, 3 bath, 2700 sq foot house in Cortez comes with almost an acre.
The other house I picked out in this price range is a steal right now at $290,000. It is right down the road from where I live, and I know the owners have already moved on and are motivated. My daughter always wants to live in this house because it has what we call a turret room. The house was built in 2004. It has 2600 sq ft, 3 bedrooms and 3 baths and sits on 3 acres.
$1,000,000
For a cool million, you’d be hard pressed to find single family homes. If you are looking in this price range, it usually means some sort of ranch that comes with a large main house plus some type of smaller farm house for the caretakers. There is absolutely no need to spend this much on a house in Cortez, Colorado. For under $400,000, you can have just about as much house as you could want with high end finishes.
For a million, you could buy a ski-in ski out condo in Telluride or one of the remodeled victorian homes in downtown Durango. In the Cortez area, you could buy this 7 bedroom, 9 bath, 6,000 sq ft lodge on 20 acres. If it were me, I’d buy a decent house to live in for around $200K and spend the rest of my mil on investment properties. but to each his own!
How much would a million buy where you live? How much do you need for your ideal home?
For sale images from realtor.com.
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I really like houses with a turret room and that is an absolute steal. I had no idea the prices were this low in the area.