July 2026

The 7 Mistakes New Aspen Home Owners Make

Buying a high-caliber home in Aspen is the easy part. Running it well is where most new owners stumble. After three decades inside these households, the same seven mistakes surface in the first year — almost without exception.

1. Hiring reactively. Roles get filled in a panic before a holiday rather than designed against the household's actual rhythm. The wrong hire in month two often defines the next three years.

2. No written household manual. Standards live in someone's head. When that person leaves on vacation — or leaves the role — the household quietly degrades.

3. Treating vendors as transactions. Snow, security, mechanical, IT, and grounds vendors should be a coordinated bench, not a Rolodex. Lack of coordination is where leakage hides.

4. Underpaying for continuity. The math on turnover — recruiting, training, mistakes, and lost institutional memory — almost always exceeds a fair compensation plan.

5. Blurring the line between family office and household. They are different disciplines. Conflating them creates accountability gaps on both sides.

6. Skipping preventative maintenance calendars. In Aspen's climate, deferred maintenance compounds fast. A missed shoulder-season service becomes a January emergency.

7. Measuring nothing. Without simple operational reporting — staffing, spend, incidents, inventory — the principal has no way to know if the home is actually being run well.

None of these are exotic problems. They are predictable, and they are solvable with the right operating system in place from day one.