As Abbey Springs nears the 2009 finish line, there is little doubt that this great community on the south shore of Geneva Lake has bucked the trend of the overall vacation home market here. With another sale just this week, the YTD total is now at 16, with two more pending transactions expected to close before the year is over. If Abbey Springs can register 18 sales in 2009, that will be a 300% volume increase over 2008. It’s still not back to 2007 levels, when 24 properties sold, but it’s a great year nonetheless. Like a stock that increases in value on a day when the overall market is down, Abbey Springs has put on a nice display of strength this year after a dismal 2008.
So what happened this year in Abbey Springs? Why the sudden return of buyers during an overall soft year? I think it’s probably a number of things, but most easy to surmise is that buyers who didn’t buy in 2008 finally ended up buying in 2009. The massive association improvements at Abbey Springs were completed just this year, meaning that 2008 was a year lost to construction, disruption, and general aesthetic discord. Buyers in 2008 were concerned about the improvements running over budget, and given the economic conditions surrounding the second half of 2008, there wasn’t much motivation to buy something based on promised improvements that weren’t yet finished. When 2009 rolled around, the improvements were wrapping up, and by May of 2009, the market had recovered to some degree from the body blow that was the 2008 financial meltdown.
For all the increased volume at Abbey Springs, it’s hard to say there’s been a significant increase in liquidity. I know, volume and liquidity are essentially the same thing, but not really. In spite of the 16 sales YTD, and the incredibly low inventory totals (just 22 active out of nearly 500 units right now in Abbey Springs), you’d have a hard time convincing many Abbey Springs owners that their property is liquid right now. Consider this. Of the 22 active Abbey Springs listings, priced from the mid $170k’s to just under $1MM, the average market time exceeds 236 days. That DOM of 236 isn’t derived from my preferred method of calculating “Real Days On Market”, where you research the property to see how many times it has either changed representation, or been pulled off the market and put back on to reset market time, which makes the 236 number even more disappointing. I know of several properties that are registering low DOM totals that have actually been on and off the market for more than a year.
Those high DOM figures are interesting, given the increased YTD volume, fairly tight list to sale ratio’s (LTS), and low inventory totals. The most recent sale, a single family home on Medinah that closed at $500k, was listed at $527,500, which records the sale at an impressive 95% LTS ratio. According to the MLS statistics, it had been on the market for 281 days prior to selling. Ah, but if we dig a little deeper, we’ll see that it was actually originally listed in 2007 for $650k, making the 95% LTS ratio far from accurate.
While many of the sales, like the one listed above, involve properties that have been willing to accept significant reductions in order to find a buyer, a large percentage of the sales this year have been for prices very close to what I would consider the market highs. If you’re looking for a deal in Abbey Springs this winter buying season, it’s difficult to know what sort of reduction off asking price you’ll be able to negotiate. While the market looks strong on paper, I have to believe that some of those sellers who are accumulating 300+ days of market time, just have to be itching to get out. If you think Abbey Springs looks interesting, which it is, let’s get together and take a tour of the property, because like last year, deals that present themselves in December and January, generally aren’t as easy to find in April and May.