Aspen – A killer kitchen, funky furnishings and million-dollar views of Ajax Mountain. This Aspen home sounds like the perfect place to spend the holidays. But Beyron Lindenau is having a problem marketing her home to prospective renters.
“When you tell people you live in a trailer park, they think that’s a little weird and they might misunderstand,” Lindenau said.
This is not your typical trailer park. Lindenau’s home is not a typical tin box.
Smuggler Park is the latest Aspen address whose residents are seeing their home prices go through the roof – often an aluminum one. Some trailer homes here are selling for between $500,000 and $1 million, and several are priced well beyond that.
“It’s startling, unbelievable, mouth-dropping,” said veteran Aspen Realtor Janet Mitchell. But she says it is not surprising.
“It’s right dead-center (in) Aspen,” she said of the park. “Location, location, location.”
The park is a five-minute walk to town and sits in an area that is surrounded by newly built multimillion-dollar, single-family homes.
There are 88 lots in the trailer park, ranging in size from 2,000 to 3,500 square feet. The styles vary, from traditional mobile trailer homes that have been pulled and parked here over the past three decades, to brick-and-mortar homes that could rival a decent-sized ranch house.
“All around us there are these super-expensive homes, and then there’s us. It’s awesome,” said Lindenau.
Smuggler Park’s humble beginnings date back to 1987, when its owner sold the lots for $25,000 to many people who were renting space for their trailers, according to Mitchell. Part of the deal was to make the park deed restricted, allowing only people who work in Pitkin County to live there. The people who live here are “police officers, ski instructors, just regular people,” said Lindenau.
She and her then-husband, Scott, secured their spot in Smuggler Park in 1988, spending $57,000 for the mobile home and the 3,300-square-foot lot. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “People thought I was crazy, but I loved it from the start.”
Less than 10 years later, Scott, an architect, would replace their metal home with one he calls “inventive.”
When he was done in 1997, the couple and their boys had a 2,400-square-foot home complete with a basement and built for $320,000. The home would go on to win American Institute of Architects design awards and be featured in architectural magazines and on HGTV.
Down the block, Doug Driscoll proudly takes people on a tour of his mobile masterpiece. “I moved here in 1967,” recalled the ski-patrol member and computer technician. Driscoll first rented then bought “the gray whale” trailer that was initially sectioned into three studios.
He paid $58,000 for it in 1989. Slowly and all by himself, he began turning the trailer into a more permanent place. He even framed the home around the original trailer, keeping some of the aluminum walls between the new drywall and the home’s exterior.
Now he has a 2,700-square-foot home but has no idea what it’s worth.
“It doesn’t really matter because I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
Mitchell says she saw the start of the park’s rising values in 2001. In April of that year, Mitchell said, she sold a 1983 Commodore mobile home for $400,000. It took six to seven months to sell.
“I broke the barrier,” she said. “I thought it was a little high, but you have to consider where it is.”
But buyers and sellers haven’t looked back on prices since.
Last April, a stick-built home with five bedrooms in the park sold for $910,000. A 1980 Magnolia mobile home sold in May for $620,000.
“It’s called sticker shock,” said Mitchell. “If I’m showing someone who hasn’t been there, the first thing out their mouth is ‘I can buy this (same) thing in Missouri for a song.’ I’ve run into that a lot.”
Scott Lindenau estimates the home is worth between $1.2 million and $1.4 million. “Nothing surprises me anymore regarding the real estate here.”
Beyron Lindenau is proud of her park “jewel.” She plans to stay put with her two sons. “What would we do with $1.2 million anyway? We can’t afford to live anywhere else in town.”
