No one would say that Abbey Springs is an architectural gem. I suppose that’s not entirely true, as people once bought bright blue PT Cruisers and they drove them home, bursting with pride. Someone, somewhere, probably thinks Abbey Springs is a stylish beauty, all those angles and so much brown and gray, thrown into a beautiful woods near the lake with a golf course twisting through. It’s nice, Abbey Springs, but the beauty here isn’t in the introduced bits, it’s in the topography and the trees and the lakefront. Abbey Springs won’t be winning any architectural awards any time soon, but buyers don’t care all that much. It’s not the architecture they love, it’s all the rest of it.
Last week, a buyer of mine closed on a small home on Rolling Green. It’s a nice enough little house, with three bedrooms, two baths, an open and airy great room. There’s even a fireplace, a deck, and a garage. If you drove past it on a weekend afternoon, it wouldn’t be a house you’d notice. The buyer didn’t buy it because he wanted your attention, in fact, he bought it because he wanted comfortable anonymity in a neighborhood where his children would never want for something to do. If the architecture is sub-par, then the amenities are a triple bogey, and in this case, that’s a great thing.
The sale closed at $350k, making it the lowest priced Abbey Springs single family home sale in quite some time. I didn’t go back to look, but there’s nothing this year or last year that sold at that price or better, as $350k in Abbey Springs typically buys you a townhome of some variety, not a single family home. The price was not too far above the ransom you’d have to pay to buy a vacant lot inside those lakeside gates, so after a reasonable remodel we’ll likely have a house that should hold its own in this steadily improving market.
There have been eight sales in Abbey Springs this year, represented by three single family homes and eight traditional condominiums. Inventory is down at Abbey Springs today, with just 24 active homes and condos per the MLS. Two homes and one condo unit are pending sale, meaning Abbey Springs continues its steady pace without any interruption. YTD sales for 2013 numbered just three, though the year managed to finish with 22 MLS sales. 2012 YTD saw eight sales, while 2011 YTD had just five. The undulations are expected, and the reality of Abbey Springs is that a poor quarter here or there doesn’t mean much. There are always buyers who want the amenities that only Abbey Springs can offer, and that’s why the sales just keep plowing forward.
If you owned a place at Abbey Springs over the last decade, and you’re now planning to sell, you’ve absorbed some major infrastructure improvement costs along the way. There’s the new restaurant, the pool, the new clubhouse and updated facilities everywhere you look. There’s a new maintenance building, and some more new this and a bit more new that. There’s lots of new in Abbey Springs, and while the condos and homes generally won’t attract any interest from Architectural Digest, the amenities are both attractive and functional, and new buyers have the wonderful opportunity to use these amenities that someone else just paid for. To buy into Abbey Springs in 2007 was to buy into a coming assessment storm, but to buy now is to buy into a community that has just been fabulously revamped, at the last guys expense.
Abbey Springs hasn’t looked to be very interest rate sensitive, as sales this year outpace sales from last year, even though interest rates are nearly a percent higher now than they were last spring. There’s reason to think that Abbey Springs continues its steady pace, selling enough units to keep things greased, while never swelling their inventory to the point of forcing a slowdown. Geneva National would love to emulate Abbey Springs, but it just can’t pull it together. That’s because Abbey Springs combines first rate golf with country club amenities AND a great big, blue lake. Lots of places have golf courses and pools, but no one else ends their property where Geneva Lake begins.