Where is the best place to invest in Summit County?

Mountain Real Estate – July 2025 | Which Properties Deliver the Best Returns in Summit County?

This month, hosts Amy Nakos and Candice De dive into a fresh analysis of 13 active Summit County listings, ranging from slopeside condos to HOA-free single-family homes. Using a detailed spreadsheet, they compare purchase prices, expenses, rental income, and appreciation to answer:

💡 Which types of properties make the best short-term rental investments right now?

You’ll learn:

• Why market pricing often balances out rental returns
• How HOA fees and utilities impact cash flow
• The difference between returns on financed vs. cash purchases
• How tax benefits and appreciation can turn negative cash flow into a positive total ROI

Whether you’re a seasoned investor or a first-time buyer in Summit County, this episode gives you the data and context you need to make confident real estate decisions.

🎧 Listen now and check the show notes for a link to the full, non-editable spreadsheet so you can run the numbers yourself.

Link to spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/AmyNakosCostofOwnership 

Transcript

Welcome to Mountain Real Estate, where we bring you the latest insights on real estate from Denver to Summit County, Colorado. I'm your host, Candice De, a realtor, investor, engineer, mom, and Colorado native. 

Hey, all, it's Amy Nakos. And Candice De. How are you? OK. We love spreadsheets.  And what we're going to bring you today  is a spreadsheet that we have adjusted. We've used it before in the past. It's included in our Mountain Trends book. But we get the question a lot from people who are investing in real estate. And they ask us, where's the best place to invest? Where's the best complex to invest? where can I make the most money on my short-term rental income?  And what I have told people in the past  is, I always say, I'm going to flip this on its head a little bit, and I'm going to say, if there were a complex  that produced higher returns than any other complex, the price would go up. So we always do say that the market pricing tends to take care of the returns that we see on these products. However, we want to show it to you. So we went through, normally this spreadsheet that we're going to be showing with you and sharing with you has a property of four comparisons, but we went out and chose 13, 13 properties that are currently on the market, some that are eligible for an immediate short-term rental license, some with a short wait list  and analyze them in this spreadsheet. I'm going to share it. And then Candace is going to run you through it because she is sort of the spreadsheet queen, if you will, going in the deepest. Spreadsheets are my love language. All right. I love that. So. All right. 

So like Amy said, we picked 13 properties. Some are condos, some are townhomes, some are duplexes, and some are single-family homes. So we really ran the gamut of the type of properties we analyzed. We looked at not only the purchase price, but also the expenses. So we have a loan purchase at 25 % down. We have a rate of 6.75 % in this analysis. And then we have your mortgage principal and interest, and we have also included taxes and insurance. And so that's your monthly mortgage payment. And then we also included utilities and HOA costs. so that you can see the full picture of your monthly costs. Can you see me highlighting this as we're working through this? Look at that. She's like the Vanna White. I'm going to be the Vanna White.  I'm doing my best here. What's important about this is previously we didn't include utilities. So we added that field and really dug into this so we could get the best  expenses that we could in the total cost. So OK, you can keep going, Candice. All right.  So we looked at the total cost per year. If you have a loan purchase, this is what it's going to cost you  annually. And then below that, we looked at the total income. So what are the rents? And some of this is based on projections, some of it's just our market knowledge. And we took that and took that delta of your cash on cash return. 

So annually, here's our costs, here's our income. And then we broke that down into monthly cash flow. So that's what's highlighted in yellow in this section. And then we looked at annually, if it's going to cost $25,000 in the case of a two-bedroom condo in Breck, what is your cash on cash return? And so for that two-bedroom condo in Breck, it's negative 10%. So you're losing $25,000 and you divide that by your down payment. That varies. So we have some that the cost is $2,000 per month, have some, the Keystone single family, your cost of your financing is $12,000 per month. So it really varies. The minimum is about $1,400. Obviously the max on that single family is really high because it's a high purchase price. 

Anything to add there? I don't think so, but what we tried to do here was give a large selection of properties. So you can look at what's my budget, what are my needs. We've often said, and I think we're seeing this in this example. 

So I've often said the best investment is if you can get a property that's closest to the lifts, know, the smallest property you can closest to the lifts. And as we look at the returns here, they're all negative numbers. So we want the lowest number. This Beaver Run right at the lifts and it's only $2100 a month, subsidizing it for a two-bed and two-bath. But we also have another outlier here, a really awesome property. And this is something to think about too. It's Candice's listing.  The reason that this one is so attractive is it doesn't have an HOA. Right? Yes. And so it doesn't have that expense. And it's got great rental potential because of the space it has. Right. So another thing to think about. We have something for everyone. Do you want to keep going on this page, Candice, with the? Sure.  

Cash on cash return with a loan purchase at 25 % down is about negative 15%. So that's something to keep in mind. A lot of people  from out of town ask if you can cash flow  not with a loan at 25%. Right. So yeah, you can see right down here, negative 15.5. Spreadsheets are her love language. Exactly.  But it gets better from here. So let's keep going in our spreadsheets. We're going to start to factor in  tax benefits and appreciation. And there's a lot of different tax benefits. We've talked a little bit about bonus depreciation and cost segregation studies. We're not even going there. Right now, we're just looking at mortgage interest tax deductions, which everybody can qualify for up to a certain point. Yes, we are not CPAs so talk to your accountant.  But this is pretty common tax write-off. So we have some tax benefits factored in here  for mortgage interest, and then we also have appreciation.  Factoring in 4 % appreciation, which is pretty conservative. We are in a changing market. Think about this over the long run, but this is an annual calculation. So if you factor in your tax write-off and your appreciation, the total economic impact per year is positive for all of these. So we see up to $30,000 down to, or up to $60,000 down to like $7,000. So really. If you factor in taxes and appreciation, these investment numbers look a lot more palatable. And if we look at the total return on investment and what the percentage there is, it's almost 8 % average. Almost 8%. 

So I think big picture on this, I mean, you can get lost in the details, right? But we don't have a product here that's returning a 30 % compared to a five. Right.  We're in between a 2% and  a 15%. So while there are differences, we aren't seeing huge dramatic differences where properties are doubling income, let's say, than other properties. 

All right. We're going to move on to a cash purchase. Yes. Do you think we covered this OK? I think so. I think we covered it. OK. We're in cash now, everybody. All right. So if you have the ability to put 100 % down and you're not financing, we're to look at these same 13 properties. So the same purchase prices and everything. And as Amy's highlighting, your cash on cash return. So we look at your mortgage ($0), we look at your rental income. It's now positive. So your rental income, well, you don't have a mortgage, is above your expenses. And so we see an average about 2 % cash on cash return  and that's just cash flow. So that's just your purchase price  and your expenses.  

You know what I love about this is that we have been saying for years, if you put down cash, your return is 1% to 3%. And I've been saying it and I've been saying it and I've been saying it we say it all the time. And then we ran the spreadsheets and low and behold, It's true. It's still holding true.  

Even with the difference that we often see with interest rates. You don't have interest rate in cash. So the market purchase price is holding this same return in terms of the value of the properties. So, and again, I like to tell people we don't control the market. We just report the market.  It's all we can do. 

But let's move down to some of the benefits we have here. So We,  in terms of the tax write-off, we now do not have mortgage interest deductions *but we do have expense deductions* Right.  Yes. So we see that those like seven,  six, seven, eight percent returns  on  cash purchases, which can keep up with the overall market. The real estate piece of this can keep up with the overall market as far as investments when you factor in appreciation. Absolutely. Here we're seeing an average of 6.3 % after factoring in the appreciation. So  we're not too far off  of the S &P.  Depending on the year. 

All right. What we're going to do is this video is going to have a link. in the comments with this document. It is not going to be editable. We are not going to allow you  to change the fields, but we will allow you to look at them. Yeah. Feel free to look at what  property looks like something you're interested in and you can run the numbers yourself. Sounds good. All right. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us again, Amy Nakos  and Candice De at the Amy Nakos group. We look forward to hearing from you.  Thanks for joining us today on Mountain Real Estate. I'm Candice De. If the mountains are calling you, reach out to me.  See you next time.