Durango Vacant Land Sales

Continuing in my analysis of real estate sales statistics over the last several years, I thought I would look at vacant land sales in La Plata County. While the vast majority of Durango real estate sales are residential, when you look at the figures in the chart below, you will see that we have certainly had significant sales volume in vacant land transactions. Just like the residential category or the commercial category, land sales have dropped significantly in the last couple of years.





When you look at it comparing 2005 to 2009, the difference is enormous. In 2005 it was just over $100 million of vacant land sales compared to just over $18 million last year. In the number of units, it went from 480 and 2005 to only 88 units last year. The biggest drops occurred in 2008 and 2009 where in each of those years is sales volume was cut in half from the year previous. It's interesting to note that the highest average sale was in 2007 and the highest median sale was in the year 2008. Median sales price today is almost $30,000 above the median sales price of 2005. The average sales price rose from $209,000 and 2005 to a high of $324,000 in 2007 and then drop back down to 211,000 in 2009. In looking at both the average sales price in the median sales price 2009 value is higher than the 2005 value.

There were a little over 320 Realtors in our real estate Association in 2009. With only 88 sales total, that means each Realtor averaged approximately 1/4 of a land sale for the whole year. Although the Team Lorenz land sales were down in ’09, we were involved in 5 vacant land transactions... considerably better than the average real estate broker.