The Real Scoop on Waterfront Sales...Month by Month

As I ride around with clients looking at various lake homes, I always get questions from them relating to typical market times and other sales statistics. I can generally answer these within reason without doing a lot of research, but I thought it would be interesting to delve a little further into the exact statistics for an entire year.

The difficulty in finding good information on this lies in the fact that there are nearly 20 different multiple listing organizations throughout Minnesota, and another 25 or so in Wisconsin. Each of these organizations has their own unique method of displaying information, and there is no realistic way to combine statitics from one organization with those from all the other areas - unless I had several days of nothing to do other than manually combine them into one big spreadsheet. Obviously, the sales statistics in Kenosha, Wisconsin may not be a good indication of what is happening in Bemidji, Minnesota, so it would be kind of fruitless to attempt this undertaking anyway.

At the current time, the Twin Cities Multiple Listing Service (also known as Northstar) is the most comprehensive one there is. It is really a combination of several individual MLS organizations around the metro area, but it also extends much further into other areas of Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. Many real estate companies in outstate areas have joined Northstar - in addition to their local MLS services - to do a better job of marketing their listings to a larger audience. So by using statistics from Northstar, we are getting a pretty good overview of waterfront sales throughout a fairly large region.

OK...we got the boring stuff out of the way. But I thought it was important for you to understand just how confusing it is out there in the real estate world, and why even with the ease of the Internet it is still cumbersome for consumers to search for real estate throughout wide geographic areas.

Now let's get back to the typical waterfront buyer and see what might be important to them. A typical day of lake house hunting might involve showings on ten different properties in the course of about 200 miles, versus maybe ten houses in twenty miles for an in-town buyer. This is because lake property buyers are normally more concerned about finding the right type of lake - along with the house that fits their needs - within a certain distance of their work (by the way, buyers in search of lake cabins may very well be looking over an even larger area that is a certain distance from their home).

If a buyer is looking for a 3+ bedroom lake home, built 1990 or later, on a 500+ acre lake, under $600,000, and within one hour of Minneapolis...we will be driving most of the day to find enough of them to look at (as of today there are only 15 of them on the market that fit this criteria). In other words, it's going to be a long day in the car with lots of thoughts running through everyone's heads.

The first couple hours are always easy. There is a lot of conversation about each other's work, family, and so on. The buyers are excited to get inside the first lake homes and get a feel for what types of things they can expect to find in their price range. Unfortunately, most of the time their expectations are a little higher than reality. So as the day wears on we begin to talk about average market times, the percentage of list price to sales price, the best time of year to buy, remodeling costs, the distance from Venus to Pluto...and so on. That brings me to what I was going to write about in the first place: the market statistics for 2007, month by month.

By going through the single family waterfront sales on Northstar MLS in each month of 2007, we can get a fairly good correlation of the amount of waterfront sales - along with market times and other statistics - in relation to the time of year they occur. Here is that breakdown:

The information below is based on average list price at time of sale, and average sale price. The average days on market are total days on market, even if listed with two different companies during that time period

January
Sold Properties - 249
Total Avg Market Time - 165
List Price - $397,046
Sale Price - $380,326
Percent of List Price 95.8%

February
Sold Properties - 262
Total Avg Market Time - 159
List Price - $421,412
Sale Price - $403,875
Percent of List Price 95.8%

March
Sold Properties - 307
Total Avg Market Time - 171
List Price - $403,559
Sale Price - $388,547
Percent of List Price 96.3%

April
Sold Properties - 441
Total Avg Market Time - 171
List Price - $443,372
Sale Price - $420,885
Percent of List Price 94.9%

May
Sold Properties - 473
Total Avg Market Time - 152
List Price - $429,403
Sale Price - $410,695
Percent of List Price 95.6%

June
Sold Properties - 524
Total Avg Market Time - 145
List Price - $435,710
Sale Price - $417,835
Percent of List Price 95.9%

July
Sold Properties - 512
Total Avg Market Time - 169
List Price - $431,954
Sale Price - $411,677
Percent of List Price 95.3%

August
Sold Properties - 413
Total Avg Market Time - 150
List Price - $401,039
Sale Price - $380,417
Percent of List Price 94.8%

September
Sold Properties - 325
Total Avg Market Time - 183
List Price - $413,349
Sale Price - $391,185
Percent of List Price 94.6%

October
Sold Properties - 339
Total Avg Market Time - 186
List Price - $433,318
Sale Price - $408,916
Percent of List Price 94.4%

November
Sold Properties - 214
Total Avg Market Time - 166
List Price - $396,617
Sale Price - $373,373
Percent of List Price 94.1%

December
Sold Properties - 187
Total Avg Market Time - 179
List Price - $446,749
Sale Price - $416,514
Percent of List Price 93.2%

So, what does all this mean? I don't know, but at least it's not a secret anymore. And just like we all knew before I spent the last several hours compiling this, there are more waterfront sales in the summer than there are in the winter!

Oh, and I guess if we go out looking at lake properties, we'll have to find some other things to talk about now.