Let’s look at the residential land sales trends, across the Flathead, by city (see chart). I’ve excluded anything above $3,000,000, and I’ve also negated parcels on navigable water (such skews the pricing exceptionally). I’ve included the Polson area, too. Left and right halves of the chart break the data into two ranges: 1-5 acre parcels, and 6-10 acre parcels. Maybe I should do a future column on the sub-acre lots per city…
The chart shows the median price per acre, by city, for transactions during the first nine months of the year (January through September), trending over the past three years. So the first orange bar says the median sales price of 1- to 5-acre parcels (in Kalispell, January through September 2016) was about $30,000 per acre. It’s nearly triple that in Whitefish. Columbia Falls is half of Whitefish, neck-and-neck with Polson on smaller tracts, and leaping forward on the larger parcels.
As I’ve said before, Bigfork and Lakeside appear more affordable than many folks assume. Columbia Falls is on a roll.
Richard Dews is CEO of Glacier Flathead Real Estate, a Flathead-based real estate software and services company.