I am Adrienne Green, and here’s a look inside my conversation with Mark Gordon, a luxury broker who has spent more than 25 years working the ultra-competitive Vail, Colorado market. This one is worth watching if you have ever wondered what real estate looks like in a market with almost no room to negotiate, no fix and flips, and sellers who genuinely do not need to sell. Mark walks through the scarcity economics that shape every deal in Vail, why he built his entire business around education instead of sales tactics, and the deliberate way he is thinking through bringing on his first hire after decades of doing it all himself. If you are scaling a business that still runs almost entirely through you, this conversation will give you a lot to think about.
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Hello listeners, welcome back to another episode. I’m Adrienne Green, and today we’re here with Mark Gordon. Now, here we focus on how real estate entrepreneurs break free of the grind and create the freedom they wanted at the start. And Mark has a really cool perspective on that as a very experienced realtor in the Vail, Colorado market. So, for listeners who aren’t familiar with the Vail market, can you give us a quick picture of what your business looks like there?
Yeah, so if you’re not familiar with Vail, obviously we are a ski town in the Rockies. What’s very interesting about us is we have no history besides being a vacation tourist spot. The town itself is as old as I am. 1962, 63 was the first ski year.
And before that it was just ranch land, and I think they grew potatoes and lettuce, pretty much nothing here. And we created this amazing vacation spot. So what’s nice is for second homeowners, which makes up most of my business, the town itself is very welcoming. Tourism, the luxury wilderness experience, is very much in the town’s DNA. So an incredibly welcoming, relatively business friendly ski town mountain town.
That is so unique, that it’s so young and that it really didn’t exist before it became there as like a ski and vacation location. Like that is cool.
Right. Yes, some mornings those 63 years don’t feel so young to me. But as far as a town goes, Vail is very young, which is really cool. So when I was on the town council in ’05 when I got elected, the mayor of the town council that I was on was one of the founders of town. And so I got to serve.
wow.
with someone who invented the town. And I would get to go ski with Earl Eaton, who was a uranium prospector and found the back bowls. So I’m like in that middle area where I straddled Old Vail and moving into New Vail, which is cool. And my business is primarily, most of my revenue comes from second home sales, vacation home sales, third, fourth and fifth homes as well. But I have a very political soft spot to work with primary residents, first-time home buyers. I got my start in town politics as a housing activist. So I work very hard to make sure that we don’t become a cruise ship in the mountains, that we remain an authentic town where a guest can come into town and
Right.
Yeah.
have a bartender who lives on the same street as them and can tell them where to go find this secret powder stash.
Right.
And that’s so important. That’s such a challenge that so many of these vacation destinations are facing right now, worldwide, as tourism has picked up so much post COVID and everybody really appreciates the luxury of being able to travel and visit and go on vacation. So we’re all doing it a lot.
Yes.
Yes. And we had a little bit more of the issues than we have ever had in the past post-COVID because everything was so busy. But we’ve settled back into our normal understanding that we couldn’t live here if our guests didn’t come here. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to go see the New York Philharmonic at an amphitheater a fifteen-minute walk from my house for twenty eight dollars and sit on the lawn if it wasn’t for our guests. So we appreciate them, and they are part of the community.
Right. And I think already, as we’ve spoken, Mark, people can understand or get that you’re much more of an educator who’s obviously passionate about where you live, rather than simply a salesperson or transactional. How did you arrive at that positioning of focusing on the education, and what’s changed in your business once you leaned into that approach?
I will be vulnerable and reveal some things about myself. Hopefully the viewers and the listeners find that interesting. I come from a long line of salespeople, but I also have always had a little bit of a negative feeling towards salespeople. I watched Glengarry Glen Ross, Death of a Salesman, all that stuff. So I’ve got that in there.
When I went to graduate school, I was teaching at Indiana University film classes. And so I’ve always been somewhat of a teacher. And so it wasn’t so much a change in my business as that was by design, the way I’m going to work. I’m going to work as an ambassador for Vail, and I’m going to let Vail sell.
And I’m just going to answer questions and point things out. It’s interesting in real estate, and your viewers will understand this. There are clients for every type of realtor. There are some people that really want someone who’s more of a selly realtor, because without that push, they would never do anything. They need that.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
for themselves to make themselves happy. My clients tend to run from a sales approach. If I started pulling trial closes, I want to put a sign behind my desk that says, never a trial close. Which do you like, A or B? So it’s just the way it works. And what makes it interesting is because
Right.
I tend to attract clients who become friends. And I think that’s a little bit easier in a vacation spot because I don’t have to be full-time friends with them. But when they come in for the week or they come in for two weeks, we go up on the mountain, we make turns, the families get together and go eat amazing restaurants, or we go on a hike, and we do all of those types of Vail things that people just love.
Mm-hmm.
Ha ha ha.
Right. I think you’ve really hit on something. You’ve chosen a strategy that is authentic and resonates with you, and therefore you attract people that you do genuinely like, and it’s probably part of the reason you’ve been able to do this for quite a while and haven’t gotten burned out, because you’re not forcing yourself to do a strategy that is fake for you.
Right. No scripts, no trial closes. Although, obviously I’m in a sales position, and there’s nothing wrong with a sales position. My business depends on me closing. So yes, there is definitely a sales part of it, but I lean into the town to do the sales.
And an interesting thing about the business here, about real estate in Vail, is we are not the type of location that the DuPont Registry will bring in someone who’s never been to Vail and buy a house. We’re not Las Vegas, we’re not Miami, we’re not any of those types of places. Pretty much a hundred percent of the people that purchase with me are people who already love the town.
Who’ve been coming to the town, whether their parents brought them here, or they just came for a week and fell in love with the town. But people have a history with Vail before they make that decision to start looking at homes. So we all have that in common. And that’s what’s really cool. So the people that live here have the same love as our guests for the Vail lifestyle. So it allows the hedge fund guy from Connecticut to become an actual friend with the bartender and go out the next morning and go ski together or go on a bike ride together. It’s a really unique place.
Mm-hmm.
That is very cool. I love how you describe that. Something that I know is true there is that there’s a scarcity, right? Scarcity economics, there’s not a whole lot of supply. And that’s in direct contrast to what we’re seeing on the national level right now with housing, where supply is creeping up and up and up. So I’d love for you to give some insight for people in terms of what your business is like that’s different with this scarcity play of just there not being that many houses in Vail.
Yeah, it’s interesting. So the town itself is surrounded by national forest. So unlike some other ski towns that have private land, we cannot have sprawl. And in fact, our ski areas are on national forest; they just have a long-term lease. So we can’t go any further than the seven miles as wide as we are, and the very narrow town, because once you start going up the hills on the valley, it turns into national forest, which is beautiful, because from my house, I see amazing forest right there. Whichever way we look, we see the forest. And we don’t have to worry about sprawl. So our development is redevelopment. And we do have a pretty much constant back and forth between how do we redevelop and what is the right density. And there’s very valid arguments on each side of that, because we’re a small town and we’re quaint. So no, we don’t want skyscrapers. But the environmentally conscious way of developing is to increase that density, because if the building happens in Vail,
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Right.
Right.
we have our free bus system. No one has to drive. We have a pedestrian village that’s modeled after Zermatt. We can keep everybody in the one place without spending too many resources. And the town is now investing a lot of millions of dollars in building employee housing right here in town, which is pretty cool to see.
Mm-hmm.
I think I got off track from scarcity, scarcity, yes.
Yes.
And I see the educator piece coming in, and I love that we’re having that true discussion about the challenge of density and providing housing for everybody who’s working there, but then also, high density housing is its own beast. So back to the original question, yes, when you’re working with your clients who are looking for those vacation homes, what does the supply look like, and how do you work within that?
Yeah, so because there’s no more Vail to build and spread out to, there’s redevelopment, and there’s a lot of purchase at the very high end. People purchase homes that to some people might seem perfectly fine, and then they’re buying that home for the land and redeveloping it. And sometimes there are
Mm-hmm.
fifteen million dollar scrapes just for the land. So what I do with the scarcity is I make sure to pre-educate before they show up and we go out looking at homes for what they can expect. First of all, that scarcity keeps the negotiation margins very tight.
Wow.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
The statistics show over many, many years that it almost never happens that a home closes for over a 10% discount off of the asking price. Only in the Great Recession were there some times where it might go to 15 or 20%. But other than that, we are within that 10%.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So we do get a lot of people who are amazing negotiators, who are incredibly successful business people, and in their context, they’re great at it. But when they come to Vail, I need to do a little bit of education on the best way of negotiating to get the right home at the right price.
Mm-hmm.
Because sometimes different negotiating techniques, depending on who the realtor is on the other side, a lot of the sellers, I know who the sellers are because we’re a small town. We have to develop negotiation strategies that fit for that particular house.
Right. Right. I’m nodding along to this, because I think for all of our listeners who are
doing real estate long distance, this is so important. When I was an active real estate agent in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I helped so many long distance investors, and we had to pre-educate them on how negotiations are done here, because Chattanooga, I suspect like Vail, is a very relational market. It’s not a huge area. And if you make a low offer thinking they’ll come back with a counter, they’re not. They’re just going to come back and say no, and they’re not going to want to sell to you anymore.
Yes.
there’s an emotional aspect. So for all of our listeners, this is real if you’re investing long distance.
Yes, and real, yeah.
And we also have on top of that emotional relationship and the emotions that get involved, it’s even more pronounced here because almost all the sellers have the wherewithal to not sell. They put it on the market because they want to sell, obviously, but they don’t have to sell. And most of them with short-term rentals
Right.
Mm-hmm.
can either offset most of their expenses and carrying costs, or all of their carrying costs. Our property taxes are very low here. So carrying costs are very low. And they get to use it on a powder day. So there is not that need to sell. So if you come in at the wrong number, if you try to, for lack of a better term, bully the seller or fish for a good counter, you wind up not getting them.
Yeah. Yes. And that can be hard for people from some markets or regions to understand. Now, Mark, I’d like to do a bit of a tangent here, because we have so many real estate investors who listen, and you mentioned the short term rental market. So for a potential short term rental investor who’s listening, in a nutshell, how would you describe the short term rental market in Vail?
It’s interesting. In ski towns and vacation homes throughout the country, there is real pushback against short-term rentals. I’m involved in the Resort Alliance, which is a subgroup of resort associations of realtors, mostly mountains, but some beach areas, that get together, and we’ve been doing studies and working on ways to push back against
the onerous short-term rental regulations. Vail happens to be a pretty business-friendly, laissez-faire market. So our short-term rental regulations are more about guest experience than keeping people from being able to short-term rent. They just want to make sure that if someone is short-term renting, the guests who rent that
are having the Vail experience, and not a bad experience, because we care about every one of our guests, whether they’re in a hotel, staying with friends, owning a home, or renting a home. So with our short-term rentals, I do get quite a few people walk into my office. I’m right here in Vail Village, and they talk about wanting an investment. And
Right.
Right.
we start talking cap rate, and their expectations are a normal cap rate, what an investor would expect. And in Vail, you are doing really well if you get a two-cap. This is not a cash flow market. And if you want cash flow, as you know as an investor, a strip mall in Denver gives you a whole lot more cash flow than a second
Okay.
or vacation home in Vail, even if you’re short-term renting it. But it’s a lot more fun to own a home in Vail than a strip mall in Denver or in Louisville, Kentucky. So if you’re going to use the property in addition to investment, it works because of the appreciation. It’s a long-term play. I ran some numbers from like 1980 to right before COVID,
Ha ha ha.
Right.
so it included the Great Recession, included some other smaller recessions, and we are averaging over seven percent per year. And that doesn’t include the hundred percent increase from post COVID. So forgetting that as an anomaly, we are over seven percent per year in appreciation. So as long as you are not forced to sell at any particular time,
Okay.
COVID, right?
and you can sell when you want to, you theoretically will make money on your Vail investment, but you’re not going to get it in a cash flow yearly basis.
Right. That was a fabulous summary of what the market is there. Gold star from a real estate investor there, gives people a perfect example, and I do as an investor think, okay, well there’s limited development that can happen there. Vail is a name that’s known around the world, so that tells me that appreciation’s going to be pretty solid there. So love that.
Good.
Right. And it’s a very sophisticated market. People know what they have. Even the banks in the Great Recession knew what they had. So I don’t think there’s ever been a real estate steal in Vail. You can negotiate and have a strategy and get in the lower range of market value, but you never get a steal here.
Right.
Right. And I think the flip side of that is when you have to sell, you don’t have to stress about people not realizing the value of what you have or having to sell at a huge discount, because there’s just tighter parameters around that market value.
Yeah.
Yeah. And there’s also almost no fix and flips here. Because of the sophisticated buyers and sellers and investors, the cost of a renovated home versus a non-renovated home really is just the difference of the renovation cost. So there’s really no room for profit margin.
Right.
Yeah, and I’ve seen that in markets as well, and it’s a good point to make there, and it goes hand in hand with that sophistication, like you said. Now, I know you’ve been doing this for a while, and I’d love for us to transition to where you can pass along some of your pro tips to other real estate entrepreneurs who are listening. So I know you have maybe over twenty-five years of experience with these transactions, and I’m curious if there’s been anything that you have systemized, proceduralized, or anything like that, anything where you can rinse and repeat and do things again and again that have made your life easier.
I’m a little bit unique in that I take pride in the fact that I think I’m uncoachable, because I’m just stubborn. I’m just a very old dog. But real estate, whether you’re an investor or a realtor or a second home, real estate is not rocket science.
We are not trying to land a booster back onto a little barge in the middle of the ocean. There is a very definitive roadmap to be successful in real estate, as long as you bring a certain level of competence, which actually doesn’t even have to be that high of a level of competence if you follow that roadmap. You need to prospect.
Exactly.
What prospecting looks like is different depending on what market you’re in. Now, I was just on a panel discussion for the Residential Real Estate Council for the certified residential specialist designation yesterday, actually, about it being the end of the year and what do you do to end the year strong. And I was the only vacation market. So
the other realtors, who are brilliant and very successful, were talking about pop-bys and events for their clients and all of that type of thing, but I can’t do that, because my clients don’t live here. So I prospect in other ways. Prospecting. You need to prospect. And when your pipeline runs dry,
Right.
look at your CRM, look at your list of past clients, look at your leads that you have, and just start making phone calls. Just do what you’re supposed to do. And if you’re prospecting and you’re following up, actually I used a bad term. I try not to use it. Past clients. There’s no such thing as a past client. It’s a relationship that should be ongoing. Make sure
Right.
that you are top of mind. You are always there. And when you reach out to them, in my opinion, do not reach out to them with a script.
You’re not a salesperson calling them. You’re someone who knows them. And for a one or two month period, you were best friends because you were talking four times a day. Continue that level of relationship, because this really is a relationship business from the realtor perspective. From the investor perspective, look at the roadmap. There’s thousands of books, and everyone is just a variation on the same
Ha ha ha.
general patterns. Sometimes an author or a coach sings to you, and that’s great, and then you follow that program, but it’s basically the same program. Did I answer that specifically? Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point, and that’s something I’m laughing about because I say multiple times that real estate is not rocket science, so we’re on the same page there.
Yeah, it’s
Now I know as we worked on scheduling this podcast, you do have some support, a support team that helps you do all the things you do, because I know you’re so active as both a real estate agent, and you also have everything you’re doing civically, with all of that, and then you’re involved in so many different realtor associations and committees and all of those things. So what does your support structure look like behind the scenes to help you with all of that? And then how did you decide what you keep on your plate versus what to hand off?
It’s very interesting that you asked that, because when I was looking at your website, I know that’s a big point of what you work on and are really into. And as I was reading through that, I was thinking I might need to have a different type of relationship with you than just being on the podcast; we might need to talk about that. Because for almost the entirety of my career, I’ve been a one-person show. I just do it all. Luckily, I’m blessed to be in a market where I don’t have to do 60 deals a year. I do fifteen to twenty, and I’m doing fine. And that gives me the time to work on NAR stuff and organized real estate stuff and do the things that are my why. So
Right.
there’s also a strategy there. A lot of people, when they hire somebody or bring on a virtual assistant, or bring someone on who’s a non-virtual assistant, or even a transaction coordinator, I think the last thing I would ever bring on is a transaction coordinator, because every time I get to talk to my clients, it creates that relationship
and strengthens that relationship. So even if I’m calling to say, hey, the due diligence deadline is today, they hear my voice. I like to talk, so it’s rare that the phone call is just me saying, hey, the due diligence document deadline is today, bye. So it’s creating that relationship, but
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
when you ask that question, right now I am in the process of bringing someone on and figuring out what the structure is. Are they going to be an assistant? Are they going to be a coworker? Are they going to be a colleague? Do I pay them, or do they work for commission? Do they search out their own business? They would have to be licensed. So I’m in the process of actually strategically thinking that through right now.
And I do have an assistant in Claude. I use AI despite the problems, despite some of the inaccuracies, because I don’t know any humans that are accurate a hundred percent of the time either. I’ve figured out ways to save myself a lot of time using AI.
Ha ha ha.
huh.
Awesome, awesome. And I love how you’re being so intentional and thoughtful as you structure this role and think about bringing someone on, because that’s where a lot of people get into trouble, when they don’t think intentionally and do it with some forethought, and they’re just doing it reactionary because they’re at a hundred and ten percent, overloaded, and they’re like, my gosh, I need help, and they just hire as fast as they can. That’s setting you up for success, Mark.
Good to hear. I hope so. So far, so good. And it’s an interesting thing, the thought of bringing somebody on, especially when for years I was very much a one-man show, I would do everything from my prospecting. And then now, about six months ago or so, I hired a firm to help, not just with social media, but they interview me every
once a month, and they book me on some podcasts, like this one, and they interview me, and then they write with me stories that then get placed in media, which helps me get picked up by the different AI systems. And I become a source. And that’s one of the goals. So it’s not so much specifically looking for someone to buy a house in Vail,
Okay.
Right.
but it’s to create my place within the real estate world. And the reason I’m thinking about bringing someone on now is that I’m going to be the ’27 president-elect of the Colorado Association of Realtors, and the ’28 president, and then past president. So I know that there’s going to be a lot more tugging on my time. So I want to have somebody
Right.
who’s here in Vail, who loves the town the way I do, who has the same sales philosophy and can get along with my clients, so that we can work together and make sure the business stays strong.
Right. I love that. And I think also what you said about how you brought on this service firm that’s helping you with the social media and with placement, that’s another source of not doing it all ourselves. We don’t have to bring it in internally. We can hire that out. And that’s something everybody in the real estate industry should look at. So I think you highlight a great opportunity to leverage as well.
But I will never give up that relationship. Opportunities to have human to human contact with my clients and my friends. That’s what ensures a real estate agent’s success. Brokerages fly their flags, brokerages can give you your tech stack, but the relationship belongs to me, the agent.
Right, that’s a good point. Well, there has been, I love this conversation, Mark, there’s been so much wisdom shared about the real estate market, about Vail, about these resort, vacation home communities. I love this. So if somebody would like to reach out, Mark, and continue the conversation with you, follow-up questions about Vail, or if we’ve got a listener who’s like, my gosh, Vail sounds amazing, I can’t wait to buy a place there, what is the best way for them to contact you?
I answer my own phone. So call me at 970 331 5821. I will pick up. I don’t have an automated pickup system. It’s so funny, realtors are the only ones who say, my god, it’s a number I don’t recognize, I better answer this. Everybody else pushes it off. We all answer. My phone number’s out there, who knows, it could be someone wanting to buy a thirty million dollar penthouse, I better get it. It never is, it’s always a scam, but that’s okay.
I love it, I love it.
Hope springs eternal. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for all of your wisdom shared. And for our listeners, that is a wrap on today’s episode. Please join me again next week for another fabulous conversation.
Right, exactly.
Thanks.