A long time ago, I decided to write a real estate blog. Along the way, there have been some really bad posts. There have been a scant handful of good ones. There have been irrelevant ones, poignant ones, others. There have been times when I wished for nothing than to stop this writing and there have been other times when I wished for more time, to work harder at this, to effort on a different level. The blog was always intended to be somehow different than a typical real estate blog. For instance, I’ve eschewed the use of multiple exclamation points. I’ve also never pretended that posting a picture of a pretty pier was something that an insightful blog would ever do. I’ve made some people happy, and I’ve hurt some tender feelings. Let’s talk about those.
Every day, all day, stock market pundits talk about stocks. They talk about this company and that company, about this CEO and that CEO. They talk about the things that make a company great, and they talk fearlessly about the things that makes the company bad. They’ll tell you to sell, or to buy, and when enough of them tell the audience to do one of those things in unison, the subject stock may rise. Often, when enough of the talkers tell their audience that a company is heading in the wrong direction, the stock falls. Billions are made and lost on these whims, yet the pundits talk and tell us what they know, hoping that what they know is more than what we already knew. I’d like to be able to do this for real estate.
And I have, to some tempered extent. Increasingly, however, if I say a sale is bad, or a house is bad, or a house is bad and the land is good, I hear the complaints. I hear of angry sellers, or angry buyers, or angry agents and their lemmings. I hear about the tender, easily hurt feelings of people who may have sold a house that I didn’t like. I hear from others who bought a house that the market didn’t like. I’m growing weary of the constant struggle to make everyone happy, and so I think I might stop commenting on the state of the market, on the state of a sale, on the state of this business.
Just kidding.
There was a sale last week on the lake, and I liked it. It wasn’t my listing, nor was it my buyer. I’m shamed by my absence from this sale, and from too many others this year, but not every buyer makes the proper representation decision and I must respect their mistake. The sale last week was of a shingle sided house in Cedar Point that first came to market in 2013 for $3.5MM. It may have been for sale before that, but I can’t recall the price or the year. That price was never right, but when the home finally sold last week for $2.185MM, I liked the sale. 103′ for that price in that location? I’m a big fan, and I always will be.
That sale was the 19th MLS lakefront sale of 2015. There have been two other auction sales, both achieving prices greater that my opinion of their actual value. Three of those sales have been in excess of $5MM. The 21 sales represent a huge swell of activity for the lake, and there are at least six more lakefronts pending sale right now. I’m expecting we’ll print those six, as well as three or four more before the end of 2015, making this year a most epic volume year. Last year at this date we had closed 15 lakefront sales, with nothing priced over $4MM.
For value minded buyers, consider this. November and early December offer some world class bargain hunting. Aged inventory generally feels like selling, and cool dreary days of November, the sort where fall slowly loses the fight against winter, those are the days we can make friends with rare value. While the year has been outstanding and lakefront buyers are milling about in record numbers, there is still value to be had if only you’ll look at those things that you’ve already passed over. Let me help you by pointing out the winners.