Two Estes Park realtors, Nicole White and Peggy Lynch, were recently recognized for their professional work and community service.
Nicole White honored by the Colorado Association of Realtors with 2024 Diversity and Inclusion Individual Award
White, a realtor with the Inspired Living Group brokered by eXp Realty, LLC, grew up on Long Island in Freeport, NY, a community White says was predominately Black and Hispanic. As a young girl, she found herself in the minority, but she says it was not an uncomfortable place.
When her family moved to Oceanside, a neighboring community that was predominantly a white enclave, she quickly became aware of attitudes of racial and cultural discrimination between groups of students who came from different backgrounds, and that bothered her a great deal.
“Kids who lived in Oceanside just two miles from Freeport were afraid of kids from the other town,” said White whose two best friends were Ukrainian and Puerto Rican. “I became passionate about exposing people diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
After graduating from high school, White left New York to study criminal justice at the University of Maryland. Following college, she found herself in Kansas and then Colorado, first moving to Estes Park in 2011 for a few years then before moving down valley and then returning with her husband, Joshua, and two daughters in 2019.
When she came back to Estes, White used her criminal justice degree as a volunteer with Estes Valley Crisis Advocates and then began working with her mother, Alison Gilbert, a realtor, who had also relocated to Estes from the East Coast.
She and her husband talked about leaving Estes Park before her girls were school age because they wanted them to know a diverse community, but decided to stay in Estes and work to help the children understand the importance of inclusive environments despite the area’s demographics.
“Diversity is more than race and nationality,” said White who has been involved with the CAR Diversity and Inclusion committee since its inception. “Diversity is also about age, gender, and ability.”
In a town of just under 6,000 people and an Estes Valley community of almost 12,000, the area is nearly 92% white, the median age is 61, and the poverty rate is just under 11%. The demographics of the area are in sharp contrast to the rest of the state. In 2020, the population of Colorado was 5,773,714 with 65% identifying as white, 3.8% Black, 3.4% Asian, and 21.9% Hispanic. The average age in Colorado is 37, and just 16% are 60 and older.
To help build awareness about the importance of diversity among her fellow realtors, White established the diversity committee at the Estes Valley Board of Realtors, and she participates in many continuing education seminars about diversity and inclusion offered for realtors. One six-hour course she completed this month, Buyers by Generations, focused on helping realtors to better understand how generational characteristics impact the homebuying process.
“One of my big pushes is fair housing. I jokingly say I am obnoxious about it. I push colleagues to take the classes,” said White, acknowledging that there is not a lot of diversity in the real estate profession.
April is National Fair Housing Month and after the first of the year White will gear up to put together a month’s worth of information to share with her colleagues focusing on things such as the history of fair housing.
“Colorado passed fair housing legislation in 1959, almost 10 years before the federal Fair Housing Act,” said White.
In addition to her work as a realtor, White is the 2025 president of the Estes Valley Board of Realtors and serves as the chair of the CAR Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She also sits on the board of the Estes Park Non-profit Network and is a founding member of the Family Advocacy Coalition which was developed after the Estes Park Town Trustees disbanded its Family Advisory Board.
Peggy Lynch was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Estes Valley Board of Realtors
The Estes Valley Board of Realtors honored Peggy Lynch of RE/MAX Mountain Brokers with its Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize her community service to the Estes Valley and her career which has spanned 35-years.
Originally from Wray, Colo., Lynch met her husband, John who was from Glen Ellen, Ill., in the late 1960s while working as a waitress at Bob Young’s Cabaret, a melodrama dinner theater in Cascade, Colo. John was a schoolteacher who got a second job working at the theater as a bartender.
In short order, the couple married and then John was drafted. Because his brother was in Vietnam, the army sent him to Korea. After 13 months overseas, he returned to the states and was discharged about a year later.
An opportunity presented itself to buy a rustic old fishing lodge on an island outside of International Falls, Minn., which often registers as the coldest place in the country during the winter.
The lodge did not have running water, electricity, or phone service. The interior of their cabin needed to be insulated and drywalled. To get water in the winter months – which began in October and lasted well into May – Lynch would have to chop a hole in the ice and drop a bucket into the lake, then haul the water to the cabin on a sled. “Fifty below is not unusual up there,” said Lynch.
As John and another man worked to modernize and renovate the cabins, Lynch had their first son, and four years later, another baby boy. The lodge became a destination for people seeking a fishing retreat and Lynch ran the restaurant.
“The lodge could accommodate 35 guests, and the restaurant could serve 85 for dinner,” said Lynch who in the beginning did all the cooking including making 25 individual loaves of bread every day. Eventually a bartender and chef were hired. The restaurant and lodge, which were open from the middle of May until it got too cold in the fall, boasted an early salad bar with homemade dressings. The days began as early as 4:30 a.m. as the restaurant prepared lunches to-go for the anglers.
A series of circumstances led to the couple owning a year-round restaurant back on the mainland, the Pickel Barrel Pub, which boasted its own grind of hamburger meat and hand cut French fries. “When we first started, we had peanuts on the tables and you could throw the shells on the floor, until finally, the health department put a stop to that,” said Lynch who was doing all the waitressing.
During this time, Lynch began to see real estate as a career that offered a good income and better hours. She got her real estate license in 1983 and after 15 years in the Minnesota Northwoods, the Lynches decided to move to Colorado in 1985.
Having grown up on Colorado’s eastern plains, Lynch was familiar with the Estes Valley. Her father loved the Big Thompson, and her family often came up the hill for day trips and sometimes for overnights.
Over the past four decade, Lynch has seen the price of properties rise dramatically. The average price of a home was about $87,000 when she first started selling real estate in Estes. Today, Lynch says the average sale price is near $900,000.
She began selling for Wheeler Reality and then in 1996 bought a RE/MAX franchise. She credits her company for helping her and other realtors weather the 2008 mortgage lending crisis because of its commission strategy. “You just pay a desk fee, have you there, and then you get 100% of your commission,” said Lynch.
She also bought property along Graves Avenue and built commercial space. Her husband, who is a woodworking artisan, used one of the units as his workshop. Today his workshop and studio are in their home.
In 2000, Lynch began to have problems with her vision and headaches. She was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor the size of a walnut that had wrapped around her carotid artery. After receiving a second opinion about her options, she had surgery. A month later, she had to have a second surgery to address a life-threatening brain bleed.
She was not able to drive for a year, and her doctor has told her that at the time he was not sure if she would ever walk again, but after almost 25 years, Lynch continues to do well.
Lynch continues to hold her realtors license, but she is not doing a lot of active selling, usually pitching sales leads to colleagues.
In addition to her real estate work, Lynch has been active with the Quota Club helping to raise thousands of dollars for the purchase of new ambulances, with the Estes Valley Investment in Childhood Success, the Estes Valley Fire Protection District, several hospital foundations, and the Bank of Estes Park Cancer Foundation.
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