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Letter to the Editor: All investments come with risk, including Summit County’s housing market

Andrew Cove
Breckenridge

All investments come with risk, and that’s just as true in Summit County as it is elsewhere.

Homebuyers take on risk when they buy a home. Housing markets do decline, occasionally, historically, even though they’ve been on a rapid ascent of late. Making a leveraged investment in a home by taking on debt (i.e., a mortgage) increases that risk.

It’s the responsibility of the homebuyer, the investor, to factor all the known and unknown or unpredictable risks into their investment decision. And one of those knowable risks is the possibility that, for myriad reasons, rental income could decrease or evaporate, temporarily or permanently, for reasons beyond the owners’ control. Leveraged homeowners finding that they weren’t prepared for these changes didn’t make informed decisions about their purchases.



It is not the towns’ or county’s responsibility to make policy decisions that protect speculators from downside risk. It’s certainly not their responsibility to protect leveraged speculative real estate investments. It might make for a poignant headline, but “Second-home owners report struggles if their properties aren’t paid for by short-term renters” would be just as accurately titled “Real estate speculators made bad investments, face consequences.”


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