It may be hard to imagine today, but in 1984 when the first Cottonwood Park homes were under construction, the southwestern corner of Jackson looked almost as rural as the ranch lands that define the landscape south of High School Road today.
There were no sprawling school campuses with synthetic sports fields. No apartment complexes. No big box supermarket or department store. The “X” at the junction of Highway 22 and Highway 89 was still considered a “Y.”
More than a generation later, Cottonwood Park is Jackson Hole’s working class hero, with scores of single-family homes and townhouses priced above entry-level condos but below the newer homes outside town limits and the more highly valued areas of East Jackson.
Two new Cottonwood properties in the last week bring the total number of active listings to 11. The least-expensive is a 2-bed, 1,126-square-foot townhouse priced at $349,500 built in 1986; the highest-priced property, which hit the market this week, is a 3-bed, 2,783-square-foot home on a 0.21-acre lot built in 1996 listed at $599,000.
Continuing to use these two ends of the Cottonwood market as a barometer for this bellwether Jackson Hole neighborhood, a similar 2-bed townhouse sold for approximately $105,000 in 1998, the most recent year for digital records. Similar units were priced as high as $520,000 during the height of the housing bubble. The new 3-bed listing last sold in 2006 for 23 percent more than the current list price.
Looking at sold units in this neighborhood, there were 10 closings during the last 12 months. Highlights include:
- The lowest-priced sale was a similar unit to the least-expensive active listing (but with 3 beds) for about 7 percent less than list price.
- The highest-priced sale was also on a similar-sized unit to the highest-priced active listing (but five years older) for about 3 percent less than asking price.
- Average sales price on the 10 sales was $453,650 for about 92 percent of list price at the time of the sale.
- Average days on market was 280.
Cottonwood Flats is a new 32-unit development adjacent to Cottonwood Park and is not included in this analysis.
As noted in a 2009 Teton Realty Today post that also took a look at Cottonwood Park, the highest recorded sale in this neighborhood was $779,500 in April 2008 for a 5-bed, 2,478-square-foot home.
Please contact me to discuss this neighborhood or for a more personalized look at the Jackson Hole/Teton County real estate market.
(Note: This analysis does not include Cottonwood Flats, a two-year-old subdivision with 32 townhouse units located adjacent to Cottonwood Park to the northeast. Information on this development also available upon request.)
