New in the east growth: Fort Morgan, Sterling tout lifestyle off the Front Range.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Who Owns Colorado?

WHAT IS THE NEXT HOT PROPERTY?

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That is the question every developer asks himself before inking a contract for a parcel of land, or laying blade to dirt on a new development. With tough competition for property in popular neighborhoods like Stapleton, Lowry, Douglas County and The Gateway, developers are starting to see communities like Fort Morgan and Sterling, on northern Colorado's eastern plains, as an untapped well of not only long-term growth, but of pent-up demand that helps new projects get off the ground.

In the two towns, there is enough support that developers have planned about 550 new homes with the hope that a flight from big-city sprawl will attract more residents.

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Perhaps most importantly, city representatives say they welcome the growth.

"Sterling has had a reputation of being hard to do business with," said Sterling Mayor Dan Jones. "I've been trying to change that. When I became mayor no one was talking to us. Now at least there are people talking to us, and a lot are committing to us."

Jones holds a Ph.D. in physics and spent almost two decades away from his hometown of Sterling before he and his wife returned to start a family--and a business. They sold their first enterprise, a technicalsupport call center, to Sykes Enterprises in 1992. Sykes parlayed the Sterling office into 40 call centers around the world and now employs about 160 people in town.

Jones' wife, Laurie, is president and COO of Sterling Biotechnologies. Her company has licensed the technology to a plant-seed-based motor oil they call Sterling Grade. In April, this technology was awarded top honors at the World's Best Technologies Forum in Arlington, Texas.

"We're not the dying community that people associate with rural America," Dan Jones says. "The Front Range elements are stealing the market out from under each other. We've got a lot of really sharp people and we chose to live in this community because we have a quality of life element."

Developers in Fort Morgan agree. In fact, next to better prices for land and finished houses, quality of life is the area's single biggest selling point. "We call it an undiscovered lifestyle. We're slowly building a market.... It's a different market than the Front Range," said Don Larrick, a developer behind three projects in Fort Morgan with plans for about 150 units. "Nobody (in Morgan County) has seen the kind of projects...