Here in Utah's hottest real-estate market it's hard not to bump into somebody peddling property.
Word is that Park City and its environs boast the highest per-capita number of Realtors this side of Aspen, Colo. The claim is tough to document, but Summit County's biggest town has more real-estate brokers per person than anyplace else in Utah.The Park City Board of Realtors, currently updating its countywide roster, counts more than 400 members. It's a nice round figure that's not especially striking until you consider they work shoulder-to-shoulder in a county of only 20,000 people. And most of the action is in Park City and the adjacent Snyder-ville Basin, population 16,000 or so.
Give or take, it boils down to one real-estate broker in the Park City area for every 40 humans.
By comparison, Salt Lake County, population 800,000, has 3,500 Realtors - a less-startling resident-to-Realtor ratio of 230-to-1.
Why the Summit County glut?
"That always happens in a market that's up," said Vic Ayers, a Park City broker who has weathered good times and bad since Park City first began earning a national reputation as a ski-resort town in the 1970s.
"More and more people get their licenses, more and more people want a piece of it," said Ayers.
"It's kind of an easy business to make money in during good times," added Brian Walker, a former Park City Realtor who last year moved his office to the Heber Valley south of Park City. "It doesn't take too long to get a license."
Indeed, as professions go, realty is more accessible than most. And that means feeding frenzies happen, which is the case now in Park City.
But real estate, plentiful as it sometimes seems, remains a limited resource battled over by rival brokerages. Competition for the very best Realtors is stiff, helping explain why Gump & Ayers, the company Vic Ayers founded in 1959 and sold in 1986, this month scaled down its once-huge local operations to a small, bare-bones office.
"Our goal is to work back up to 10 to 15 people in Park City," said Jerry Floors, president and principal broker for Gump & Ayers, whose headquarters is in Salt Lake City, with satellite operations in Ogden and Provo. The company's Park City downsizing comes on the heels of its Heber City office closure, only a few months after that operation opened its doors in an area that is expected to be the next Park City.
The local history of Gump & Ayers, named for Vic Ayers and his mother, Marjorie Gump, is a microcosm of the unpredictability of real-estate fortune in general and the volatility of the Park City market in particular.
After Floors purchased the company nine years ago, it somehow managed to lose its No. 1 position in the Park City market and end up a distant also-ran. Whether its demise was market- or management-driven is open to conjecture, but at least some of it had to do with increasing competition. National franchises like Better Homes And Gardens, Century 21 and Prudential came to town and wooed many good agents away.
Such big-time companies were drawn to the area by an ongoing land boom that was in full swing by 1990 after things bottomed out in the early 1970s, rose again and fell once more in the mid-1980s.
Gump & Ayers found its initial niche in 1974, when it bought the bankrupt Park Avenue Condominiums and - through an aggressive advertising blitz - sold them in a few weeks time, much to everyone's surprise.
But last year was not an especially good one for the company locally, even though the Park City market set a record $366 million in real-estate sales, according to Dennis Gray, a Realtor who compiles statistics for the Park City board. The previous high-water mark, established in 1993, was $294 million.
The industry is the third-biggest employer in Summit County (behind Park City and Deer Valley ski resorts), accounting for between 1,000 and 1,500 jobs when spinoffs like title-company and bank employment is counted. 1995 sales included 554 homes at an average price of $279,237 and 571 condominiums fetching an average $200,254. Realtors typically got a 6 percent or 7 percent cut.
It seems like enough prosperity to go around, but the fact is that a fraction of the area's Realtors are responsible for most of the commerce, a universal aspect of real-estate life.
"It's like that everywhere: A minority of the agents sell a majority of the property," said Chris Eberline, president of the local board, insisting that competition for the blockbuster deal is fierce but not brutal.
"We really still are extremely nice and friendly to one another and go out of our way to help our fellow Realtors."
Gray, however, said realty's not everybody's cup of tea, requiring patience, skill and enough money to live on until that first quarter-million sale is scored. "If you have the cash, time and education, I'd say yeah."