Earlier this year, I wrote an email to an owner of vacant lot. I told him should be be interested in selling, there was a likely premium awaiting him. He hadn’t bought the property too long ago, but the market had been looking for what he owned, and it was obvious to me at that time that some pent up demand had to exist. He emailed me back and said he wasn’t interested. This was earlier this year. Recently, he emailed me asking for a price for his property. I told him a number that was indeed a premium, but not as significant of a premium as I had mentioned earlier this year. He was angered by my number, and suggested that I must have forgotten what I told him only a few short months prior. In fact, I hadn’t forgotten that lofty number at all, but in the time since that quote the market had added inventory in this specific segment, and that inventory had failed to sell. The market momentum that I sensed earlier this year had been squashed under the weight of competing inventory. The time to sell was last spring, the momentum was there, the market ripe, the window missed. This is not my fault.
Sellers have a hard time with this discovery. When it comes to real estate, you can either sell when the market wants you to sell, or sell when you want to sell. There’s no other choice. If you sell when the market wants you to sell, you behave like I do- you lock a gain when you see one, and you move on to the next project. When you sell when you want to sell, you assume the market will respond kindly, because after all, you’re a seller and your house has that sweet gold faucet in the master bathroom. But the market doesn’t care about you, it doesn’t care about your faucet, and if you decide to sell when the market isn’t primed for your specific offering, you’ll flutter in the wind as you await the whim of the market to turn your way. This concept isn’t that hard: Sell when the market is good, hold when it’s bad, but don’t sell into a bad market and expect to overcome it just because your house is special. Yes, I know that in that line of ranch homes your home has an outdoor kitchen that consists of some stacked concrete blocks with a grill precariously perched in the middle.
If you’re a long term holder of real estate, then you needn’t worry about the right time or the wrong time, you just live and you enjoy the seasons and you replace the roof when the time comes. This is how most of us tend to view real estate. We view it as though we’re there forever, or for long enough that market peaks and valleys matter little to us because after a long time of ownership we’ll have enjoyed some appreciation no matter the immediate mood of the market. But this self considering view is incorrect, because most of us move every 5-7 years and if we’re timing those moves at the peak of a cycle then we’re selling high and buying high, and if we miss the peak then we’re buying low and selling low, the net gains are the same. So if we’re going to buy and sell, shouldn’t we do so in an opportunistic manner?
The time is now to be an opportunistic seller if you’re an owner of a lakefront home with a market value in excess of $3MM. Never before has there been so much liquidity in the upper bracket of this market, and I do mean never. Sellers of homes in $3-4MM range have always enjoyed some level of active market, so their inclusion in this segment isn’t unexpected. What it unexpected is the demand over $4MM, and that demand continues with pace all the way through $8MM. Without exaggeration, several of the homes I’ve sold this year are homes that I could have sold twice. The market needn’t have one hundred buyers in this segment to thrive, it just needs a handful and that’s exactly what it has right now.
And that brings us back to the timing of it all. Yes, conventional wisdom says to list in the spring. But conventional wisdom is wrong in this case. If you’re a lakefront owner with a property in this discussed segment, now is the time to sell. You don’t need to sell now, obviously, instead you could wait until next year when you’re more ready. But next year has its own set of unknowns and the only thing known is what the market is doing today, and today it wants to buy your expensive lakefront home. This year, three lakefront properties have closed over $3.9MM. I’ve been involved in all three of those sales. Two more sales over $5MM are pending sale right now, and those are both my listings as well. It shouldn’t need to be repeated but if you’re a lakefront seller looking to capitalize on this market, I’m your guy.