Teton County, Idaho — Q2 2021

While Teton Valley, Idaho, has often been referred to as the “Quiet Side of the Tetons,” the west side real estate market has been anything but “quiet” for the last 12 months.

Unlike Jackson, which saw a measurable slow down during Q2 2020 (that is, during the onset of COVID), Teton Valley has shown a consistent uptick of activity throughout the global pandemic.

To put the valley’s growth in perspective, in 2019 (i.e., pre-COVID), Teton Valley and Alta, Wyoming, generated 586 transactions for the entire calendar year that totaled $181.9M. It should also be noted that 2019 was also a banner year for the west side real estate market.

Fast forward 18 months, and the valley’s real estate market has exploded. For the first six months of 2021, Teton Valley is up 163.2% on transactions (or 577 closed transactions for YTD 2021 vs. 220 sales for the same period in 2020) and is up 217% for dollar volume (or $236.1M for 2021 vs. $74.5M in 2020).

More impressive still is looking back on the totals from the last 12 months (that is, July, 2020 through June, 2021). In trying to assess what a post-COVID Teton Valley real estate market looks like, the last 12 months have seen nearly 1,500 closed sales and more than $525M in dollar volume.

In other words—and if this level of activity continues through the 2021 calendar year—Teton Valley and Alta, Wyoming, will have grown from a sub-$200M market to a more-than-half-a-billion-dollar market in just two years.

LAND & RANCHES

The Teton Valley real estate market can easily be defined as a “land grab” at the moment.

Of the 577 properties that have sold thus far in 2021, 408 (or 70.1%) have been vacant parcels of land. That percentage is an increase over the same period in 2020 (where roughly 5 out of every 10 sales were raw land), but the more-than-400 transactions on the year to date is a 292.3% increase of transactions over the first six months of 2020 (when only 104 vacant parcels of land sold).

While individual values will vary across the valley (for example, if one parcel of land has a Teton view vs. another), the median land sale price also doubled from $75,000 in 2020 (for a 0.74-acre parcel in Teton Springs) to $149,950 in 2021 (for a 2.9-acre parcel in Driggs).

CONDOMINIUMS/TOWNHOUSES

Unlike the vacant land and free-standing home market in Teton Valley, the townhome and condominium market is somewhat finite. Not only is inventory scarce, but townhome complexes are clustered in a limited number of locations (mostly around Victor and Driggs).

Statistically, the numbers for this market segment are comparatively unimpressive; transactions are up 28% and dollar volume is up 37.6% year over year.

In delving into the data, however, and looking at some 2021 sales in this category, individual sales share a very telling story. For example, in June, 2020, a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,481 townhome at Buffalo Junction in Driggs sold for $290,000. Eleven months later in May, 2021, a similar unit sold for $450,000 (or a 55.2% increase in less than a year).

SINGLE FAMILY HOMES

Arguably stifled by a lack of inventory and rapidly escalating prices, the home segment of the Teton Valley market saw “only” a 55.7% jump in overall transactions thus far in 2021,  but a 180.6% increase in dollar volume. So while one of out five sales in 2021 involved a house, more than half of the YTD dollar volume in Teton Valley involved home sales (or $121.1M out of the total YTD market dollar volume of $236.1M).

A surge in the upper-end of the market (that is, listings of more than $1M) helped fuel the statistics. In the first six months of 2020, only three homes sold in excess of $1M. Thus far in 2021, that number has sky-rocketed to 41 sales of homes greater than $1M and has pushed the average home price in Teton Valley to $984,000.

In looking at the median home price year-over-year, the numbers are equally as astonishing. For the first six months of 2020, the median home sale was $497,573 (for a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,633 sq.ft. home in Golf Vista Estates). Fast forward to 2021, and the median sale had increased to $780,000 or more than 56% (for a 4-bedroom, 4-bath, 3,768 sq.ft. home outside of Victor).