Buying in the USBeyond the River of No Return Wilderness, deep in the Rocky Mountains of western US, an eco-friendly luxury resort is being built. Peter Murtaghventures out there to report
IDAHO, in the US's Pacific northwest, sandwiched between Montana to the east, Washington and Oregon to the west, Canada to the north and Utah and Nevada to the south, is the 43rd member of the United States, admitted to the Union on July 3rd, 1890. It is much larger than Ireland but has a population of only 1.3 million.
For much of its existence, agriculture, government spending and retail formed the backbone of the economy. Twenty years ago, high tech didn't figure in the State's top five sectors; today, it is number one and accounts for a whopping 25 per cent of total revenue. Boise is the semi-conductor capital of the US and is home to a range of IT companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Micron. Retail and government spending are also both in the top five sectors of the state's economy.
The other two? The others are real estate at number two and construction at number five. A powerful and linked combination, one that is displayed with knobs on at Tamarack Resort, the huge real estate development to which we're heading. North from Horseshoe Bend, I-55 hugs the Payette River as it winds through a steep gorge of stunning, Rocky Mountain scenery - a place of whitewater rafting, bare granite escarpments, mature pine trees and bright blue late summer skies. The scenery is everything first time visitors (such as me and my wife) expect of the Rockies. There is a vastness, a majestic remoteness about the place that really is awesome (that much over-used word in America).
The Americans are great for naming places with blunt exactitude. My favourite is the name given to the vast area in the centre of the state around the Snake River Mountains. Created in 1980 and named four years later after a long serving senator who died that year, it is called simply The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.
Further along I-55, we notice many plots of land for sale - and not just individual sites; whole farms are up for grabs and the for sale signs on most mention development potential. Although there are lots of cattle around, the old ways are clearly dying. At Cascade, the long established saw mill closed not long ago with the loss of 150 jobs.
But in the distance across the still, shimmering water of Lake Cascade, a 21-mile long reservoir with a comfortable 70 degree-plus summer temperature, construction cranes are visible against the backdrop of a mountainside.
Tamarack Resort, our host, rests between the mountain and the lake and is a case study in how to develop a high end tourist and residential facility without destructive consequences for the environment - the opposite in fact. Frenchman Jean-Piere Boespflug is sitting in blazing late afternoon sunshine on the terrace of The Lodge at Osprey Meadows, a six-storey high alpine-style hotel-cum-condominium block. The lodge has a high quality restaurant (morel mushrooms and elk are on the menu), a gym, two swimming pools plus a large scale hot-tub and a terrace with a view to die for. The Lodge is also, in effect, the club house for the Osprey Meadows Golf Course, an 18-hole course created by the Robert Trent Jones design team from Palo Alto in California.
Tamarack, America's first all-season purpose built resort in over 20 years, has around 30 miles of mountain bike trails. JP, as the CEO and 50 per cent owner of Tamarack is known to his colleagues, is a fan and is gulping down glasses of homemade lemonade having spent the morning tearing up and down the mountainside.
Surveying the golf course, he's more than a little proud of what the Trent Jones people achieved. "We said to them 'How many acres do you need for a really good golf course?'. They said 100 to 150. So we said 'Take 400 and make it really special'," he says between gulps of lemonade, the perspiration rolling off his forehead.
In January, Golf Digest magazine declared the course the best new public course in America. What makes the course special in my view is that some 250 acres of it - meadow and wetland land weaving in and out of the fairways, and nudging up against the greens - has been returned to its natural, wild habitat. The first person employed by Jean-Pierre and his main partner, chairman Alfredo Miguel, a Mexican industrialist, was a naturalist, a position held today by Llona Clausen. As a result of her work, farm field drainage ditches have been done away with and the natural courses for streams flowing off the mountain have been restored. There's no more farm fertilizer and cattle effluent flowing into the lake.
The land has been replanted with wild plants native to the area. Copses of aspen and pine have been preserved. The area is a riot of small animals, especially chipmunks, squirrels, and a host of small birds. Larger ones too . . . "There are nine pairs of bald eagles nesting in and around Tamarack," says JP. "We have 60 ospreys, six or seven of them in the resort itself, and lots of red-tailed hawks. We have a big responsibility to them and everything around us here." Deer roam the meadow as well and sometimes black bears come down from the mountain.
In winter, the golf course becomes a playground for snowshoeing as well as Nordic and cross-country skiing. On the mountain, there are no less than 41 downhill runs accessed by seven lifts. Of the runs, 44 per cent are classed as intermediate, 17 per cent as novice and 39 per cent for advanced skiers.
The summit is 7,700ft above sea level and the drop down to base is 2,800ft. Snowboarders may indulge themselves on the 18ft high Hells Canyon SuperPipe which is Olympic Games standard.
Skiers are limited in number to 2,500 per day at present, rising to 3,500 per day when the resort is finished. Limiting numbers and offering above average quality service is a key part of the Tamarack business plan. The resort is midway through construction. When finished - around 2016 - there will be 2,043 dwelling units. Right now, there are a little over 600.
The properties available are a mixture of apartments in The Lodge and individual houses and sites of varying size scattered among the trees, around the golf course and up the mountainside. Many homes are beautifully designed and have incredible views. Almost all have ski in-ski out access to the slopes.
While each cottage, town house, chalet and estate house has been obliged to adhere to certain common design requirements, all using a mixture of timber, logs and local stone (mainly gneiss and granite), most have been individualised by their owners.
Ready to move into homes are selling for between $4.5 million (€3.24m) for a 622sq m (6,700sq ft), five-bed estate home; to $889,000 (€640,650) for a 116sq m (1,250sq ft), two-bed cottage; to $629,000 (€453,282) for a 95sq m (1,023sq ft), one-bed townhouse. Sites sell for between $499,000 and $1.9 million (€359,653 and €1.369m).
Capital appreciation has been rapid: the cottages sold for $440,000 (€317,192) when they first went on the market in January 2004. Today, one is for sale for $899,000 (€648,087). To give an idea of the way prices are going generally, apartments in The Lodge were selling for around $650 per sq ft (€6,996 per sq m ) in January 2005.
In October 2005, property in The Village Plaza, six residential, retail and restaurant blocks currently being built to form the heart of the resort, was selling for $850 per sq ft/$9,149 per sq m (€613/€6,599). In March this year, property in The Fairmont, a hotel, residence and apartment development 50 per cent owned by former tennis players Andre Agassi and Stefanie Graf, was selling for $1,300 (€937) per sq ft. A few weeks back, that rose to $1,400 (€1,009).
The Village, as the name states, will be just that: a pedestrian-only central point of the resort, the place to which most people go at some stage after their day walking, cycling, golfing, boating on the lake or skiing. "We're a boutique resort," says Michael Ferensowicz, the man overseeing the construction of The Village and identifying suitable retail tenants.
There'll be no McDonalds here. The target is established, high end shops and restaurants already trading in California and other resorts such as Sun Valley in Idaho and Aspen in Colorado. When completed in 2009, The Village will have 130 apartments (all sold off plan) plus 10 restaurants and 18 boutiques.
Apartment owners can put their property into a resort-managed rental pool, blocking out agreed slots for themselves. Rental potential is high at $300 to $500 per night (€216-€360) in the high season.
Maintenance charges are also high compared to Ireland but reflect the level of service offered. Charged are levied at a rate of $5 per $1,000 (€3.60 per €720) of the value of a property, says Ferensowicz, computing at around $400 (€288) per month for a property worth $1m (€720,000). But, and it's a big but, you must add to that a charge of around $1,000 (€720) per month for concierge and other services and internal building maintenance.
The developers say a prudent investor (and the overwhelming majority of buyers are investors) will calculate for all maintenance fees to be met by rent . . . but not the purchase cost.
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