Sales hit $36.14 million in building lot reservations at site
By Tom Ross
Sunday, September 9, 2007

The site plan for Barn Village at Steamboat shows three distinct neighborhoods based on the size of building lots and types of homes. Duplex lots along Fish Creek were in high demand and sold at prices from $995,000 to $1.15 million

Buyers got in line Aug. 31 to reserve new building sites in the figurative shadow of the historic More Barn and put refundable deposits down on more than $36 million in real estate.
Within three hours, 51 of the 54 building lots in the first release of Barn Village at Steamboat were spoken for. The remaining three were reserved in a 10-minute span the next morning. The most expensive of the building sites were duplex lots that topped out at $1.15 million.
By the time the Labor Day weekend was over, 75 percent of the lots had backup reservations in place, and a dozen lots had two backups.

Barn Village at Steamboat comprises a total of 62 home sites on 40 acres to the east of the historic More Barn. The developers, Bob Comes, Jim Kelley and Eric McAfee, held back eight lots from the initial reservation process.
The iconic barn will be conserved and incorporated into a 4-acre city park fronting Pine Grove Road.

The subdivision approval allows primarily three types of housing. There are 12 duplex lots, 34 small lots for single-family homes in a neo-traditional neighborhood with back-loaded garages, and larger lots for larger single-family homes. The broader site also envisions two multi-family buildings, which were not a part of the reservation process. One will be used by the developers to meet their affordable housing requirements. Yampa Valley Medical Center has secured the right to develop a multi-family building on the south edge of the subdivision where it could provide transitional employee housing for new hires.

Eastman did some tentative arithmetic on the smaller lots in the neo-traditional neighborhood based on maximum lot coverage and building heights in the applicable “resort neighborhood” zone district. He concluded that buyers could easily build homes of several thousand square feet. Building height restrictions would allow homes to be 2.5 stories tall, he said.
Comes said he and his partners held back eight larger single-family lots in the eastern end of the subdivision where it borders the neighborhood along Robert E. Lee Lane and Memphis Belle Court. He said the reason was twofold. First, they will wait to let the value of the building lots mature in Steamboat’s rising real estate market.
Second, they want to take time to consider going forward with developing homes on the eight lots themselves.
The four larger lots that were reserved last week began at 0.32 acres and increased to 0.58 acres in size. The smallest was priced at $695,000, and the most expensive was priced at $735,000.