ߣÏÈÉú

Traer Creek LLC, the land investment company that owns The Village (at Avon) on the north side of town, has a 40-acre parcel of land on the valley floor that has yet to be developed. Kensington Development Partners, a mixed-use development company with offices in Denver and Illinois, is partnering with Traer Creek‘s affiliate, Jasmine Development Inc., to bring some of this land to life.

Phase I of the Kensington Development project, set on 6 acres, will include a 26,000 square foot Whole Foods Market, additional retail space and a building with roughly 100 condominium units. The aim is to make the community walkable, with trails throughout the area.

The goal is to break ground on phase I in spring 2026, said Jared Eck, a Kensington Development partner.

“We have been successful over the last 10 years with these mixed-use projects that have a strong retail anchor and residential next to the strong retail anchor,” Eck said. “We’ve found that the retail makes the residential more successful, and the residential makes the retail more successful because you’re really delivering a community to kick off a larger development.”

“We view this site that Traer Creek owns as a perfect opportunity to re-create that model,” Eck said.

Support Local Journalism

Donate

Phase I includes Whole Foods, condominiums, retail

Kensington has been working on the project for “a couple years,” Eck said.

“These types of projects always take time to get to this point,” Eck said. “We’ve been developing plans and discussing this project with Traer Creek over the last year or two.”

Whole Foods will serve as the “anchor tenant” for the development, helping to draw in other retailers.

“It’s certainly a different type of grocery offering than I think currently exists in the valley and in Avon,” Eck said. “It creates a variety of offerings, which is good for everybody.”

Kensington Development’s goal is to bring in vertical development, with market-rate condominiums. “The vision for the site is really one that’s more vertical rather than spread out,” Eck said. “We still think there is a strong demand for condos in the market.”

Eagle County — and Colorado as a whole — has a shortage of condominiums available for sale compared to potential demand due a combination of regulatory complications and the volatility of the market.

“There certainly has been an under supply of condos based on our analysis, and I think there’s a multitude of reasons for that,” Eck said. “There’s still a huge demand, especially in the Vail Valley.”

Sen. Dylan Roberts sponsored a bill — the Constructions Defects & Middle Market Housing bill — that was approved by the State Legislature during the 2025 legislative session to encourage builders to construct attached multifamily housing of two or more units. During a town hall in Avon in June, Roberts said condominiums offer a path to first-time homeownership.

Will development contribute to Avon’s affordable housing stock?

The project is not required to include affordable housing, and phase I as currently designed will not. But the project will bolster Avon’s community housing offerings in another way.

When the town of Avon approved The Village (at Avon)’s Planned Unit Development (PUD) in 1998, the 1,700-acre area was approved for 2,400 units of housing, of which 500 units were required to be affordable housing. With the construction of the 244-unit Buffalo Ridge Apartments in the early 2000s, Traer Creek far exceeded its initial requirements.

“Traer Creek LLC does not have an obligation to provide the remaining 256 affordable housing units until there is a total of 650,000 (square feet) of commercial development AND there is a total of 1,881 dwelling units constructed,” wrote Avon Town Manager Eric Heil in an email to the Vail Daily. “The trigger to construct more workforce housing is likely to be decades away and actual development may never reach the total commercial square footage trigger.”

To date, nearly 355,000 square feet of commercial space, 243 hotel rooms and close to 500 apartments, including Buffalo Ridge Apartments, have been built within The Village (at Avon).

Even if no community housing is constructed in phase I or phase II, any construction on the two parcels by Kensington Development will indirectly contribute to the construction of community housing.

The valley floor of The Village (at Avon) lies within the boundaries of the Avon Downtown Development Authority, which collects the increment of new property taxes from all new development after receiving voter approval in August 2023. At least half the funds collected by the Downtown Development Authority are required to be used by Avon to construct community housing.

“I think it’s important to note that everything that happens here, within the Traer Creek land, the 40 acres, is part of the Downtown Development Authority, so a massive amount of the revenue that is generated with this project goes toward community housing needs,” Eck said.

Phase II of the project, which is currently in the works, would develop the 6 acres to the east of phase I. Phase II will likely include ground-floor retail with residential units above.

“The vision is more of a vertically integrated project on phase II, with retail on the ground floor and some type of residential above the retail on the ground floor,” Eck said. “We’re still very early on in the planning stages of that, but we’ve been very encouraged with the variety of local tenants as well as national tenants that have expressed interest in this vertically integrated phase II to play off of the Whole Foods and all of the activity that Whole Foods drives.”

Kensington Development has not yet ruled out building community housing within phase II. “We’re certainly evaluating different options on parcel II right now,” Eck said.

What happens next?

Before phase I of the project breaks ground, it will need approval from Traer Creek’s Design Review Board and the town of Avon. “We’re pretty early on in terms of the formal approval process, so we have some conceptual plans,” Eck said. 

Avon town staff reviews and approves the technical requirements of most development within The Village (at Avon), including “streets, bus stops, drainage, utilities, and basic physical elements of development site plans like building height, set-backs, parking, and landscaping,” Heil wrote.

Avon’s Planning and Zoning Commission can review and comment on development plans on the valley floor in The Village (at Avon) but does not have the right to approve or deny an application.