Updates from Sally Shiekman

There's a reason the Fourth of July feels different here.

For so many of the people I work with, Independence Day is the moment they finally exhale. The calendar clears. The mountains are green. The air is thin and clean, warm in the sun and cool in the shade. And for one long weekend, the only thing on the schedule is freedom — the unhurried kind.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about why the Fourth is the holiday that makes people dream of escaping to the mountains. I want to take that a step further now, because once people start dreaming seriously, they almost always ask me the same question: If I'm going to put down roots in a mountain town, why Aspen, Snowmass or the Roaring Fork Valley — and not somewhere else?

It's a fair question. Park City, Whistler, and Vail are beautiful places. So I'll answer it honestly.

A FOURTH OF JULY LIKE NO OTHER — ESPECIALLY THIS YEAR

This year the Fourth carries even more weight. Aspen is marking both the 250th anniversary of the United States and the 150th anniversary of Colorado, and the city is celebrating accordingly: a two-day carnival in Rio Grande Park with a 65-foot Ferris wheel, rides, games, and food, a July 3rd concert, the traditional world-renowned Fourth of July parade, and a drone show lighting up the night sky.

But the spectacle isn't really the point. Holidays are a kind of stress test for a town — they reveal what a community actually values when everyone shows up at once. Spend the Fourth in the Roaring Fork Valley and you'll feel it. The parade still feels like a small-town parade, not a tourist event. The rivers are running, the trails are open, and you can fill an entire day with hiking, biking, paddling, or doing absolutely nothing on a deck with a view of the Continental Divide.

What you won't feel is the sense that the place has been paved over to hold as many people as possible. And that's not an accident. That’s the whole point.

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ASPEN PROTECTS WHAT MAKES IT ASPEN

Here's the difference most people don't fully appreciate until they've owned property in more than one mountain town.

Aspen holds some of the strictest building and preservation standards of any resort community in the country. The city was one of the first in Colorado to formally protect its historic character, and it now safeguards more than 300 historic resources. Most exterior work — and even some interior work — must pass through design review before a single nail goes in. Building heights are tightly capped. Mountain viewplane protections keep the ridgelines you love from being walled off by the next development. There are rules governing site grading, tree preservation, snow storage, even a neighbor's access to sunlight.

The valley goes further still. Pitkin County's growth-management system limits how much new residential square footage can even be built in a year — by design, to protect the land, the water, and the feel of the place. Not long ago the city paused certain residential building permits entirely, simply to think carefully about the pace and scale of development.

To a developer, that sounds like friction. To an owner, it sounds like protection.

Because here's what those rules actually buy you: the view you paid for stays the view you paid for. The character of your street doesn't change overnight. The mountain remains the hero. Scarcity here isn't a marketing word — it's written into the code.

HOW OTHER WONDERFUL TOWNS COMPARE

I want to be fair, because these are genuinely lovely places.

Park City offers easy access and a great deal of new condo inventory, which suits a certain kind of buyer well. But abundant new inventory is precisely the trade-off — more supply, more density, more building. A different bargain than the one Aspen offers.

Whistler is spectacular and world-class on the mountain. It is also in another country, with the currency, cross-border, and travel realities that come with owning abroad.

Vail sits closer to Denver and is beautifully run, but its village was master-planned and built to scale around volume. It's a marvelous machine. Aspen, by contrast, is a town that grew up around a mountain and then chose — deliberately — to stop growing the way other towns kept growing.

None of these are wrong choices. They're simply different ones. The real question is which trade-off you want to live inside of for the next twenty years.

FREEDOM, WITH ROOM TO BREATHE

There's a particular kind of freedom that comes from open space protected on purpose. From knowing your slice of the valley won't be crowded out. From a town that treats its land and its history as something to be respected rather than maximized.

That's the version of Independence Day I love most here. Not the carnival or the drone show, lovely as they are — but the deeper feeling underneath them: room to breathe, in a place that fought to keep it that way.

The Fourth of July is the perfect example of why there is nothing else quite like Aspen Snowmass and the Roaring Fork Valley. It's a holiday about freedom, celebrated in a place that understood early, and on purpose, that real freedom needs something worth protecting.

If this is the year you stop dreaming about it and start thinking seriously about putting down roots, I'd love to help you find the right place — and help you understand exactly what makes ownership here different.

Let me put my Mountains of Experience to work for you.

Sally Shiekman
970-948-7530
SallyShiekman.com

People ask me this question constantly right now, and I appreciate that they do — because it tells me they're paying attention. The short answer is: yes, in some ways the market has softened. Year-to-date through the first week of June, Aspen recorded 57 closed residential sales versus 81 over the same period in 2025 — a 30% drop in transaction count and roughly 45% decline in dollar volume ($536M vs. $983M). But "softening" in Aspen means something very different than it does anywhere else, and conflating the two would be a mistake that could cost buyers and sellers alike.

Let me give you the data first. Q1 2026 recorded the lowest first-quarter sales volume since 2020. March closed sales in Aspen fell 50% year-over-year — from 24 transactions in March 2025 to just 12 this year. Snowmass Village dropped 46%, from 13 closings to 7. Active inventory has climbed to around 158 listings, with roughly 9.4 months of supply, and homes are now selling at approximately 90.77% of asking price — a meaningful shift from the frenzied post-pandemic years when sellers held all the cards. Days on market for condos have extended to 115–155 days in some segments. These are real changes, and I won't minimize them.

What I will push back on is the narrative that this signals structural weakness. The 2025 market was extraordinary by any measure — $2.509 billion in total Aspen and Snowmass dollar volume, 42 sales above $20 million (up 62% from 2024), and a single-family median in Aspen of $17.5 million, up 31% in a single year. Comparing 2026 to that baseline is like measuring a normal winter against the historic 2022–23 snowfall and calling it a drought. And the longer view backs that up: average sold price per square foot YTD sits around $3,233, down roughly 9% from last year's $3,554 — but the 10-year average annual appreciation rate for Aspen remains 10–11%, and the 5-year compounded annual growth rate is near 13%. A single soft year against a decade of double-digit compounding is not a trend reversal; it's a pause. Several converging headwinds hit simultaneously: a record-low snow year in January and February dampened the buyer energy that typically arrives with ski season; tariff uncertainty and Federal Reserve volatility created hesitation at the top of the market; and frankly, some buyers are beginning to push back on pricing that accelerated faster than fundamentals alone would justify. These are cyclical pressures, not structural ones.

What hasn't changed is the foundation. Pitkin County unemployment sits at just 2.3%. Inventory — while rising — remains roughly 40% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. The ultra-high end isn't just active — it's making headlines. Media mogul Byron Allen just paid $91.3 million for a Red Mountain estate, in an off-market deal that wasn't even publicly listed. That's on top of three other $30M+ closings already this year, including a $42M McLain Flats sale and a $37M Red Mountain trade. Buyers with real capital aren't waiting for a "better moment" — they're moving now, off-market, on their own terms. The "billionaire effect" hasn't disappeared; it's simply moving at a more measured cadence. Down-valley, Basalt and Carbondale are telling their own stories — Basalt single-family saw a 65% jump in median price in January, and Carbondale's condo market is seeing compressed inventory at just 1.8 months of supply, suggesting that the broader Roaring Fork Valley remains a target for buyers who want proximity to Aspen at comparatively accessible price points.

One more number worth sharing, because it speaks to who you want in your corner in a market like this: Aspen Snowmass Sotheby's International Realty's share of Aspen's residential dollar volume has climbed to nearly 33% year-to-date, up from 19% a year ago — more than double our closest competitor. In a slower market, every transaction matters more, and that gap reflects depth of relationships and local expertise, not luck.

My read: this is a recalibration, not a retreat. For sellers, it means pricing discipline matters more than it has in years — overpriced listings are sitting, and the market is telling you clearly when you've missed the mark. For buyers, the window of selectivity you now have is genuinely new. You have options you didn't have in 2022 or 2023, and that's worth something. But I wouldn't confuse increased negotiability with an impending correction. The long-term thesis for Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley — four world-class mountains, the Ideas Festival, the Music Festival, a globally recognized lifestyle, and a supply of land that simply cannot expand — remains as compelling as it has ever been.

There's also a sentiment shift I'm hearing across the brokerage that's worth mentioning, even if it's anecdotal rather than statistical: a number of agents believe this summer is shaping up to be busy. The theory is that many buyers simply sat out a lackluster ski season — low snow, high rates, a noisy macro backdrop — and are now eager to spend real time in Aspen once the weather turns. We won't know if that pans out until the numbers are in, but it's a reasonable read of a market that's pausing rather than retreating.

Here's the truth I keep coming back to: in Aspen, Snowmass, and the Roaring Fork Valley, in up markets and in down, the differentiator isn't economics. It's Mother Nature.

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*Sally Shiekman is a Senior Partner at Aspen Snowmass Sotheby's International Realty with decades of experience representing buyers and sellers across Aspen, Snowmass Village, and the Roaring Fork Valley. Let me put my Mountains of Experience to work for you.*

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### Sources

1. **Aspen Times** — "Aspen Snowmass real estate market update shows sales 'fell sharply' in 2026" (April 8, 2026)
   aspentimes.com/news/aspen-snowmass-real-estate-market-update-shows-sales-fell-sharply-in-2026

2. **Christie's International Real Estate Aspen Snowmass** — First Quarter 2026 Aspen Snowmass Market Report, analysis by Dr. Elliot Eisenberg (April 21, 2026)
   christiesaspenre.com/first-quarter-2026-aspen-snowmass-market-report

3. **Houzeo** — Aspen, CO Housing Market in 2026: Home Prices & Trends
   houzeo.com/housing-market/colorado/aspen

4. **Hudson Smythe** — Aspen Real Estate Market Report: January 2026 Analysis
   hudsonsmythe.com/blog/aspen-market-report-january-2026

5. **Estin Report (Tim Estin, Aspen Snowmass Sotheby's)** — Q1 & March 2026 Aspen Snowmass Real Estate Market Snapshot
   estinaspen.com/real-estate-market/q1_mar-2026-aspen-snowmass-report