The Blaine County real estate market has continued to register strong sales in 2021, with the median sales price of homes up over the record-breaking year of 2020.
The median sales price has steadily risen in the past five years due to low mortgage rates and limited supply compared to demand, the Sun Valley Board of Realtors trade association stated in a mid-December report.
“Blaine County is a seller’s real estate market,” the report states.
The median sales price rose 38.4% in 2020 compared to 2019, the report states. As of mid-December, the median sales price this year is up 17.4% year-over-year, hitting $775,0000—more than double the median sales price five years ago. The median sales price was $364,000 in 2015 and dropped slightly in 2016, but has risen every year since then, reaching $600,000 in 2020.
In addition, the number of active listings is down about 20% so far this year, the report states.
The association attributes the steady rise in the median sales price to “the ever-increasing buyer demand for homes in the area, especially for properties with plenty of space and seclusion.”
“In recent years, the lack of supply in Blaine County was the main reason for home prices going up,” said Debra Hall, incoming Sun Valley Board of Realtors president. “But since the summer of last year, we saw an unprecedented demand for homes along with historically low mortgage rates, and that reflects the median sales price as much higher than pre-pandemic measures.”
Home sales in Blaine County skyrocketed during the second and third quarters of 2020. Total property sales in the county were a little under $1.17 billion last year, a record high that was up nearly 100% from just under $585 million in the 2019 calendar year. The total sales figures include sales of residential, commercial and farm/ranch properties, as well as land.
“The ability to work remotely has likely contributed to the high demand due to the area’s affordability compared to major cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other mountain resort areas,” the report states.
Meanwhile, the high cost of housing and shortage of affordable rental units has made it difficult for many in the local workforce to be able to stay in the Wood River Valley. The city of Ketchum has been working on several projects to address the crisis, including financially supporting the 51-unit Bluebird Village housing project in central Ketchum, raising a development fee used for affordable housing and aiming to pass a new local tax for workforce housing.
City officials have also been working for several months to pass an ordinance to enact regulation of short-term rentals in the city. The ordinance—now partway through the approval process—requires operators of short-term rentals to obtain a city permit and to meet specific maintenance and fire-prevention standards for units to ensure occupant safety. Some city officials have speculated that people converting long-term rentals to short-term rentals for visitors has added to the workforce-housing crisis.
In its report, the Board of Realtors states that people maintaining short-term rentals is “not to blame for the high cost of living in the Wood River Valley.”
The Board of Realtors report cites a city-sponsored survey of short-term rental owners in Frisco, Colorado, a mountain resort town near the Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Keystone resort areas. In the survey, some 86% of owners said they don’t maintain long-term tenants because they personally use the property at different points during the year and rent at other times to offset their expenses, the report states.
“Assuming that survey results would be similar here, one of the most immediate conclusions is that there aren’t enough usable conversions from short-term rentals to long-term rentals to warrant the hardship that increased taxation or unit quantity restrictions would inflict on property owners that occasionally utilize short-term rental opportunities when schedules allow,” said Bob Crosby, government affairs director for the Board of Realtors.
In its initiatives, the city of Ketchum is not working to limit the number of short-term rentals.
Crosby and the Board of Realtors maintain that residents are likely being “priced out” of the market because of increased demand resulting from increased remote work opportunities and new investment in resort areas linked to trends of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report offers some possible actions to boost the inventory of workforce housing, including development of “an incentive-based approach to encourage select short-term rental owners to convert to long-term rentals where the personal use characteristics, unit size, location and possible rental rate indicate potential as a workforce long-term rental.” 
