John Coley

One of my listings for sale is 302 Villas On The Harbor, a 1 bed 1 bath condo in Lake Martin’s Stillwaters Community. The Villas On The Harbor sits right next door to Harbor Pointe Marina, and Harbor Pointe Condos.

I got a challenging email the other day from Ron Botterbusch, Broker of RB Commercial Properties in Montgomery. He said:

Click here to read what he asked on my blog Lake Martin Voice

If I drive directly to my office from home, I never glimpse Lake Martin. So sometimes (read Mondays) when I am headed to the office, and need some inspiration or a reminder about what I am really doing, I drive to Kowaliga Bridge, take in the view, and turn around refreshed. Today it was really helpful, especially after hearing so much bad news lately about the real estate industry.

If you talk to families that have owned or rented Lake Martin homes for a long time, you will never hear them say, “boy we enjoyed the lake house, except for the late 1970s’ oil crisis” or “golly, the failure of the savings and loan banks in 1987 really screwed up my weekends at Lake Martin.” Nope.

Instead I hear comments like “that lake house has been the only place I can really relax” or “my favorite pictures of our kids were the ones we took on the dock…” Somehow, during WWII, Korean War, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam War, oil quotas, 19% rates, S&L Crisis, Tech Bubble, Y2K Crisis, 9/11, Iraq …. somehow people still like their lake homes.

Did I get a cool picture of a heron or did I settle for a yellow tree?

CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY BLOG LAKE MARTIN VOICE to find out.

To respond to some readers’ comments, I thought I would publish a few more statistics from the Lake Martin MLS* waterfront home sales for August 2008.

Before I get into it, let me first caution all readers not to draw broad conclusions about the Lake Martin real estate market from the following two graphs. I still maintain that looking too deeply into monthly sales statistics may be misleading, since we have such a very small market in terms of number of sales. It just doesn’t make for a very good sampling pool when there are only 20 sales. So again I stress, this is for illustrative purposes only. Keep in mind that you are only looking at 20 sales, only in the month of August.

The chart below makes a great case study as to why I am loathe to use trend analysis on monthly sales statistics. I am trying to answer the question, what did waterfront homes sell for relative to list price in August on Lake Martin? As you can see, sale number 18 does not have a sold price listed (no blue bar). So if I were to include that in the average, it would totally mess up the average calculation. I am sure that the home wasn’t give away for free. For some reason, the seller chose not to list the sales price in the MLS. It was a home that listed for around $300,000 - so I imagine it sold for around that amount. But I don’t want to guess, so I left it out of the average calculation. It’s a rolling average, so e.g. only the first 10 sales are averaged in #10, then on #11, 11 are averaged, etc. On the last one, #20, I only average 19 since #18 was zero.

Nevertheless, here we go. The blue bar is each sale’s % of Original List Price divided into sales price. Original List Price is the list price used when a home was first entered on the Lake Martin MLS. So if a home was put on the MLS on January 1 for $450,000 - then the list price was reduced on March 1 to $400,000 - then sold on August 15 for $385,000 - the calculation is $385,000 / $450,000.

Here is another chart, attempting to describe the average Days On Market for each waterfront home sold through the Lake Martin MLS in August. My old statistics professor (RIP) would have a fit looking at this. The standard deviation is too huge to be useful. It goes from zero on the low side to a high of 456. The rolling average ends up at 159.

Click here to see the next chart and more commentary on my blog Lake Martin Voice

Lake Martin MLS* waterfront home sales did not match the sun and fun for August 2008.

July 2008 waterfront home sales turned in a winner, beating 2007’s mark and giving us hope of the start of a rally.

To read the results and see my 3 charts,

CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY BLOG LAKE MARTIN VOICE

If you’re wanting to find out more about The Preserve at Stoney Ridge on Lake Martin, please see the below video I shot to show the amenities, just click the play arrow below:

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ON MY BLOG LAKE MARTIN VOICE