A cool-looking little Gingerbread house of a home sits at 165 N. Gros Ventre St. in downtown Jackson, priced at $4 million.
It’s a 1,000-square-foot cube, with two bedrooms and two baths on a 0.34-acre lot.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable inside the home to warrant its $4 million listing. In fact, the interior is dated, and the downstairs area in particular needs quite a bit of work.
If it’s not the house itself that commands $4,000 a square foot, what’s really valuable about this home?
It’s that old business cliché — location, location, location.
The Gros Ventre home lies in what’s known as the Gill Addition, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Teton County, the richest in the nation.
Downtown neighborhoods are hot commodities right now, with lots of people seeking to move into Jackson’s downtown.
“Buyers may not want to have an acre outside of Jackson to take care of plowing and landscaping and grass-cutting,” Keller Williams Jackson Hole broker Ian Osler told Cowboy State Daily.
“So, instead of the buyer who comes into the market and wants to be near the ski area, there’s this interest lately in being close to the town square, the shopping, the restaurants, the galleries, and the walkability," Osler said.
That means the real value in the property at 165 Gros Ventre is in the land itself, not its structure.
In fact, Osler said the most likely fate for this particular cube on the Jackson map is for a developer to buy the property, tear the house down, and then make two downtown lots, squeezing two shotgun-style homes side-by-side on long vertical, 0.17-acre lots.
Welcome to the expensive and complicated Tetris game that Jackson real estate has become.
Why The Gill Addition Is Special
The Gill Addition is considered one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Jackson, Osler told Cowboy State Daily.
“The reason why it’s considered the most exclusive area in Jackson is for a couple of reasons,” he said. “It’s all residential in this one area, and it’s not mixed with any kind of commercial properties, or apartments, or anything like that.”
It’s also within easy walking distance of the town’s iconic square at just three blocks away, and it even borders the National Elk Refuge.
“So, it’s the accessibility to the town square, or the walkability, or use whatever word you want,” Osler said. “And it’s also a very quiet neighborhood in general. It has wide streets, and most everyone there has significant landscaping.
The home at 165 Gros Ventre, meanwhile, may look cute and gingerbready on the outside, but inside it needs some work, Osler said.
“It’s a smaller home, and the upstairs wouldn’t be too difficult to remodel, but the downstairs though, which does have habitable space, is a real mess,” he said.
Some of the bedrooms have obvious problems as well, like wires hanging out, and there may be hidden problems as well, given that it’s an older home.
“It would cost a lot of money to fix up the house,” Osler said. “So, the land is the actual value.”
That is off-putting to many potential buyers, given that most people want to buy a turnkey home that doesn’t require a lot of time, effort and money to rehabilitate.
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors) 
This 1,000-square-foot home in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, lists for $4 million. Its real value, however, is its land and location. (Courtesy Teton Board of Realtors)
The Tetris Effect
Building a new home at retail rates are somewhere around $1,000 per square foot in Jackson, Osler estimated. So, on the high side, a prospective property owner could get a new, single-story home of 4,500 square feet for around $4.5 million.
But here’s the kicker. With the property straddling a lot line, a prospective homeowner or developer could buy the property and tear the house down, then stand up two houses in its place.
Homes in the area go for around $6 million each, Osler said, according to the MLS data he looked at.
If the owner wanted to keep one of the homes for himself, he could defray the cost of building his own home by about $6 million or, if a developer, he could have two homes to sell instead of just one.
In fact, in the Gill subdivision, a developer could be working with as many as four units, given that lots in that neighborhood are each allowed one accessory unit, which can be rented out or used as a guest home.
And that’s where things begin to look just a bit like Tetris in Jackson right now.
Maps of Jackson shaded to show different areas with different zoning laws show cubes of pink here for one set of zoning laws and cubes of green there for another.
“You might have a property that’s zoned M2, and then you pull up the zoning area and it’s green, while one street over it’s pink, and it’s a different zoning, and then another area is blue,” Osler said. “It just depends on exactly where you are.”
With the different colors corresponding with completely different rules, it becomes a giant game of expensive Tetris figuring out which property cube actually fits a given need.
That complicates things a bit for realtors and brokers, who need to be aware of all these nitty, gritty details.
The Potential
The home at 165 Gros Ventre has been listed for 173 days so far, and its original list price was $4.7 million.
Osler believes the home is probably still a little overpriced for the market.
But only just a little bit.
“In my opinion, it’s really only worth $3.5 million,” he said. “(That) would mean the lots are worth $1.75 million each, and that’s about what I think the property is worth. I bet they could get that sold for about half a million dollars less.”
The cost of demolishing the existing structure would range from $25,000 on the low side on up to $100,000 on the high side. Given that properties in Jackson go for multiple millions, that’s not a significant piece of the puzzle when penciling out a deal with developers. And, likely, the developer could strategize a bit, keeping the existing garage for one of the homes.
Osler estimated that a developer could build two single-story homes of up to 4,500 square feet and still meet all zoning requirements, including setbacks, parking, driveway and landscaping.
Each home could include a basement or second story for an accessory unit that could be rented out, making for a total of four units on a lot that used to have just one living space.
Other neighborhoods, meanwhile, can have up to eight units in all.
It all depends on where a particular property lands on the Tetris map that’s become Jackson real estate.
For Comparison
If the same house were listed in Cheyenne, Wyoming's capital city, it would go for more than one hundred times less, according to Dominic Valdez, a real estate agent there.
Valdez said he thinks it would list somewhere between $275,000 and $300,000.
But he wasn't overly surprised at the price tag in Teton County.
Reached Saturday morning, Valdez emailed, "Jackson is a whole different planet!"
Renee Jean can be reached at: Renee@CowboyStateDaily.com
