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Downtown Pagosa Gets Cheaper, Part Two |
Bill Hudson | 7/8/09
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Read Part One
The new yellowish signs that appeared on several of developer David Brown’s downtown properties last March displayed the name of a real estate company I didn’t recognize: Saddleback Properties. Under the company name was a phone number, and the name of realtor Jana Burch, whom I knew from the Jim Smith Realty office several years ago — back when the fledgling Daily Post was hosted on Jim Smith’s website ... and back when I first began writing about the development activities of David Brown.
I wasn’t Mr. Brown’s biggest fan, back in those days.
A couple of days ago, when I realized I was going to be writing about the price reductions on Brown’s various properties here in ‘Pagosa Country,’ I wandered down the street early one morning and stood in front of Jana Burch’s sign on the huge, fenced, empty lot — about one acre of well-maintained lawn right on Main Street — where Brown was once planning to put a ‘boutique hotel’. Or at least he was considering planning a boutique hotel.
He’d shown the Town Council an architectural model of a boutique hotel, anyway, and had bothered to get some property rights vested. But now the property was for sale, apparently at a "reduced price." Continued...
I dialed Jana’s phone number on my cell phone and stood there in the morning sunlight, chatting with her — explaining that I was working on an article about Brown’s lower prices on his downtown properties.
Would she be able to give me some information about the new pricing?
I honestly didn’t expect that Jana would be able to talk to me freely. As I said, I haven’t always been Mr. Brown’s biggest fan, and sometimes my lack of enthusiasm for his development activities has spilled over into my Daily Post writings. I doubted Mr. Brown would be terribly interested in giving the Daily Post an exclusive story.
The fact was, the first time I officially met David Brown, I was standing in this very spot in the East Village, videotaping one of the old houses from that property being salvaged by local dentist and landlord Randall Davis. David Brown and one of his business partners were also watching the progress of the house-moving crew, and I asked David if he would like to be included in the videotape.
He said, no, thank you.
Then, with a pained expression on his face, he asked me, “Why can’t you write anything nice about me?”
As I recall, I was too stunned to even try and answer him. I’d been the Daily Post editor for only a few months at that point, and I really had no idea how my (often critical) writing might be affecting the local community leaders I had been covering. I never suspected that a multi-millionaire developer — with probably enough money to buy the whole of downtown Pagosa — would be concerned about what I might write on my little website.
 Now I found myself standing in the same exact spot, asking Jana if she could share any info about David’s decision to slash his prices on several downtown properties.
She told me she would have to check with David, to see what she might be able to share. We hung up, and I wondered what David’s reaction might be to such a request from the Daily Post.
When I heard nothing back from Saddleback Properties, I guessed that I would have to do my own research into David Brown’s new pricing — and make my own assumptions about how those pricing changes might be affecting other downtown property owners.
The next day, while running some errands downtown, I stopped in at Jim Smith Realty, next door to the County Courthouse. Jim Smith has been involved in the local real estate business about as long as anyone in town, and a couple of years ago — when Pagosa real estate market here was still booming — Jim spent a pretty penny completely renovating his formerly-modest office overlooking the San Juan River into an elegant, two-story complex with real estate offices upstairs and a café downstairs.
That renovation came shortly after David Brown presented his plans for a “revitalized” downtown to the Town Council, back in 2004 and 2005. I can’t say for sure that Jim Smith’s significant investment in his own downtown property came as a direct result of Brown’s proposed plans — but I can’t help but wonder how many downtown property owners saw Brown’s development efforts as proof that Pagosa Springs was on the verge of finally becoming the “Aspen” or “Telluride” type resort many of us feared it might turn into.
Certainly, Pagosa has always had the scenic beauty to rival any other Colorado resort town. Maybe all it needed, to tip it over the edge from poverty into prosperity, was a multi-millionaire developer like Mr. Brown to get things started?
When I walked into the Jim Smith Realty office, and asked who could give me some information about Mr. Brown’s property, I was directed to one of Jim’s agents: West Davies. I’ve known West for several years — I had designed his first website when he first moved into town and joined the Jim Smith team, and lately I’d been following his efforts as a volunteer with the Town Tourism Committee.
West told me he had all of Brown’s properties as a saved search on his computer, and a few minutes later, I had a packet of spreadsheets and property info printouts, all neatly spiral-bound. West had even included some background tax information from the Archuleta County tax records.
The cover sheet was the promotional email Saddleback Properties had sent out to various area realtors and investors. In big, bold Helvetica type, the heading read:
“Summer Sale!”
Yes, folks, downtown Pagosa Springs was officially “on sale” at bargain prices.
Read Part Three, tomorrow... |
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