Open a search for condos in Meadow Village and you will eventually hit two listings that make no sense sitting side by side. One prices out around $360,000 for a two-bedroom. Another, a few blocks over, similar square footage, similar age, asks well over a million. A buyer new to Big Sky reads that gap as a deal. It isn't one. The cheaper unit was never for sale to most of the people looking at it, and the reason has nothing to do with the market and everything to do with paperwork recorded on the title long before either listing went live.
Big Sky runs two separate deed-restriction programs through the same handful of blocks near Town Center, and they do not behave the same way at resale, at appraisal, or at closing. Treating them as one thing, "the affordable one," is how a buyer loses weeks to a home they were never eligible to close on, and how a seller's comp set quietly stops meaning anything.
Two Programs, One Neighborhood
The Big Sky Community Housing Trust runs both. Good Deeds pays existing homeowners for a permanent deed restriction on a home that already exists somewhere in the market-rate stock. The trust hands the buyer up to 20 percent of the appraised value at closing as down payment assistance, in exchange for a permanent occupancy restriction: at least one resident has to work a minimum of 30 hours a week for a Big Sky business and use the home as a primary residence. Short-term rental is prohibited from that point forward, for every owner who follows.
The second program is the Community Land Trust model, and it works from the opposite direction. Instead of restricting an existing house, the trust owns the land itself, builds homes on it, and sells only the structure to an income-qualified local buyer. MeadowView Condos, Big Sky's first project built this way, is described by the Big Sky Resort Area District as the community's first deed-restricted complex offering local workers homeownership at subsidized rates. Reported resales in 2025 closed around $165,000 for a studio and $360,000 for a two-bedroom, both governed by a 2 percent annual appreciation cap.
That is the number a buyer sees on the search results page. What they usually don't see, until they ask, is that the number isn't a market price. It's the output of a formula that has nothing to do with what the unit next door commands.
Why the Comp Doesn't Comp
If you're pricing a market-rate condo in Meadow Village and a MeadowView resale shows up in your comp pull, take it back out. A home capped at 2 percent annual appreciation since it was built isn't telling you anything about buyer demand for square footage or finish level in the neighborhood. It's telling you what the formula produced that year. Appraisers who work Big Sky regularly know to screen these out. Buyers and sellers running their own numbers off public listing data often don't, and it skews the price they think they're negotiating from in either direction.
The gap is about to widen. In January 2026, the housing trust closed on 99 acres near Town Center for $39.75 million to build Cold Smoke, a neighborhood reserved for 389 permanently deed-restricted homes using the same land trust structure as MeadowView. The trust's own materials put the target buyer pool between 100 and 250 percent of area median income. For scale, the trust reported the area's 2025 median household income at $102,600, which puts even the top of that range well under typical Big Sky market pricing. Infrastructure work was slated to begin this spring, with vertical construction on the apartment portion still planned for the fourth quarter of this year, first apartment occupancy expected in 2028, and the 125 single-family homes following in 2029. Every one of those eventual sales will carry the same appreciation cap and the same income-qualified buyer pool as MeadowView. None of them will function as a market signal for the neighborhood forming around them.
What Actually Surfaces at Closing
The friction with either program rarely shows up while you're touring the property. It shows up in the paperwork.
A deed restriction has to be recorded in a specific order: the property deed first, the restriction second. If a Good Deeds applicant already carries a mortgage, the lender has to agree in writing to subordinate to that restriction before the trust will release the down payment assistance. Not every lender will do this, which is why the trust maintains its own list of lenders familiar with the program.
A few other details tend to catch buyers late in the process:
- The restriction is disclosed to every future buyer, permanently. A seller cannot let it quietly lapse or negotiate it away.
- A property can only be restricted once. Buy a home that already carries a Good Deeds restriction, and you are not eligible for a second round of down payment assistance, though you can apply for a separate, deferred 0 percent loan instead.
- On the land trust side, MeadowView and Cold Smoke buyers must join the trust's homeownership interest list and complete a homebuyer education class before they're eligible to apply at all.
- The trust caps a purchaser's net worth at half the home's appraised value, on top of the income test.
None of this is unusual for a workforce housing program. It is unusual for a buyer who assumed "deed-restricted" meant one flavor of paperwork and one price ceiling.
The Programs Don't Match at Resale, Either
Here is the part that trips up even people who have closed deals in Big Sky before. Good Deeds carries no appreciation cap and no income limit for the buyer at resale. The restriction that survives is the occupancy and rental rule, not a pricing formula. A Good Deeds home can sell for whatever a qualified local workforce buyer will pay, subject to the same 30-hour work test as the original transaction.
The land trust model works differently. The trust describes it plainly: homes resell to qualifying households below market, with "a ground lease that limits the appreciation owners will receive at resale." That's a fixed 2 percent a year, regardless of what the surrounding market does in the meantime. Two properties that both say "deed-restricted" in the listing remarks can carry completely different resale math, and the only way to know which one you're looking at is to read the recorded document, not the listing description.
What's Coming to the Blocks Around Town Center
Cold Smoke is going to be close. The trust's own materials place the apartment portion east of RiverView, with the broader footprint sitting northeast of Town Center. When David O'Connor, the trust's executive director, announced the land closing to the Big Sky Resort Area District board in January, he told the room simply that it was "mission accomplished" after a process that took more than a decade of community organizing and legislative work to fund. For buyers and sellers in the surrounding blocks, the practical effect over the next several years is more inventory carrying the land trust structure sitting inside the same search radius as market-rate homes.
That's worth knowing before you write an offer, and worth knowing before you set a list price. The number you see on a Meadow Village listing is rarely describing one market. It's describing at least two, running through the same zip code, and only one of them moves with everyone else's.
Can a second-home buyer purchase a deed-restricted unit in Meadow Village? No. Both programs require full-time local employment and primary residence occupancy for at least one household member, which structurally excludes second-home and investment buyers.
Does a deed restriction show up in a standard title search? Yes. It is recorded against the property, disclosed to future buyers by the seller, and reviewed by any title company handling the transaction.
If I already own a market-rate home near a deed-restricted project, does that affect my property's value? Not directly. The restricted units are excluded from comparable sales analysis precisely because their pricing follows a formula rather than market demand, so they should not move your own comp set in either direction.
Will Cold Smoke homes eventually resell on the open market? No. They will resell through the trust to another income-qualified local buyer under the same 2 percent appreciation structure as MeadowView, not through a typical open-market listing process.
If you're weighing a purchase in Meadow Village or pricing a listing against a market that is quietly running two different sets of rules, Sandy Revisky De Leon has spent close to three decades sorting exactly this kind of detail out for Big Sky buyers and sellers. Let's Get Started.
