Voda, eau, agua, H2O, water. No matter how you spell it, it’s in short supply. Tom, our benevolent editor-in-chief, declared that this month’s paper would focus on the giver-of-life, water, so I’ll do my best to oblige. I think most folks have heard the rule of three, whereby you can survive about three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food. But in terms of the local real estate market, the focus of this column, the calculations aren’t as simple and frequently another familiar expression about water comes into play – “Whiskey’s for drinking and water is for fightin’ over.”
Whether it’s a tap, a well, spring water, a cistern, decreed water, or ditch company shares – water has a BIG influence on the value of real estate in our area. I remember when I moved to the valley, over 20 years ago, how bewildered I was about the concept of “hauling water.” Having always lived in the ‘burbs, I couldn’t comprehend the concept of bringing home a load of water, like a gallon of milk, until one day when I was picking up my car from the local shop, albeit a few minutes after closing, and while using my debit card to pay, Anthony asked if he could bum a couple bucks to get a load of water to take home because he’d already locked the safe. Say what? The idea that you could buy 500 gallons for the price of a 16oz bottle at the gas station threw me for a loop. And the thought of having to constantly keep an eye on the water level in a cistern, like watching the gas gauge, gave me pangs of anxiety. But it undoubtedly promotes efficiency! From a real estate perspective, homes on cisterns are more difficult to sell and don’t bring as much as a comparable home with a water tap would.
Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone who specifically wants a property with a well, usually because they want to be independent / self-sufficient. But buying a place with a well has its own set of issues. For starters, during the inspection process it’s a good idea to have the well tested for capacity – how much water it is capable of producing measured in gallons per minute. Anything less than about three-gallons per minute starts to be a little dicey. Then there’s the question of water quality. Almost all the well water around here is hard, meaning that a water softener will be needed, but there is a long list of other stuff on the lab report that will dictate how much treatment it will take. A sophisticated treatment system can be $10,000 – $15,000 upfront with the ongoing expense of filters and salt, etc… and someday the pump will have to be replaced so it’s not free water. As I learned when living with a well, softened water isn’t compatible with a swamp-cooler either because the salts added in the softening process are evaporated out, forming a scale crust on the cooler that deteriorates its parts and a reverse osmosis unit is needed to remove the salt for drinking water.
So it’s just better to have a water tap, right? Maybe, but not all taps are created equal. The Fruitland Mesa “dole” taps are undoubtedly the most unique in our area. When I tell a prospective buyer that tap delivers just a quart per minute through a metering device, like taking a full sixty seconds to pour a bottle of Pelligrino, they often have a look of bewilderment, visualizing a thin trickle of water coming out of the kitchen faucet. Of course homes on these taps have a cistern to store 1000 or more gallons and pumps to provide water pressure. Providing up to 10,000 gallons of water per month, it’s enough water for household use and some for stock water too. As the drought continues, spring fed systems like the Town of Paonia, Pitkin Mesa, Stucker Mesa, Sunshine Mesa and others are keeping a close eye on consumption vs supply and will implement restrictions as needed to maintain service and most have moratoriums on the sale of new service connections. It gives a new meaning to being “tapped out.” Water is the limiting factor to growth in our valley, and it will be interesting to watch how the real estate market responds to increasing demand with such a limited supply.