The Elegant Augusta Real Estate Blog

Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 28th, 2007

North Augusta is not very well known for it’s golf communities. In fact, I think it’s more known for it’s quiet, slower pace, with open fields and valleys and good fishing holes. But in fact there are a number of excellent courses in the area, and I’d like to point out that we have some excellent golfing communities that are very affordable.

The River Golf Club

Are you interested in living along the scenic Savannah River? How about having a short commute to either North Augusta or Augusta? How about some fantastic golf? Well if your answer is yes, the River Club may be for you!

The River Club is semi-private. The public green fees include cart fees as only members can walk the course. The fee schedule itself varies but they do offer discounts for seniors and twilight play. They also offer package deals for groups and events.

Members of the club get priority tee times, unlimited greens fees, and are allowed to walk during play. There are individual and family memberships available.

The course itself has amazing views of the Savannah River, and is a full-fledged 18-hole Jim Fazio design. They offer Black, Blue, White, and Gold tee placements, which vary the yardage from the black tees at 6847 yards to 5647 yards for the gold tees.

There are two ways to get a home in River Club, either by purchasing a River Club home along the Savannah River, or by buying a property in the adjacent Hammond’s Ferry.

Be careful about contacting Hammond’s Ferry independently… They use their own real estate agents and just by contacting them you will be locked in to using their agent. This will leave you without any representation on your behalf. Make sure you already have a signed client agreement with your own Realtor if you wish to inquire there.

Additional Information:
River Club Website
Hammond’s Ferry

Elegant Augusta GA Real Estate Resources:
Homes for Sale in the River Club
A more detailed profile of the River Club

Midland Valley Golf Club

Midland Valley is a public course located right off of #1 Highway between North Augusta and Aiken. The course itself is an Ellis Maples design that was built back in 1963. The age of the course has worked to it’s benefit. Like a fine wine, the surroundings have only gotten better with age. The hardwoods and pines lining the fairways are old-growth, giving you an impression of solidity. The course seems to remind you that it has been here for a while and aims to stay.

There are a good amount of water hazards on the course and plenty of elevation changes, making it a challenge for the casual duffer. It’s not unusual to play through ducks and geese that bed down on some of the ponds, and every few years there is a gator sighting.

The course itself has 3 tee placements, varying the playable yardage from a high of 6900 yards to 5500 yards. It is the site of US Senior Amateur play and of US Open qualifying rounds. The par 71 course has Bermuda grass greens.

Midland Valley homes have lots of square footage and even larger lots. Typically the homes are around 3000 to 3500 square feet, and most of the lots are an acre or more. The bulk of the neighborhood dates from the late 60′s and 70′s, though construction has continued into recent years.

Elegant Augusta GA Real Estate Resources:
Homes for Sale in Midland Valley Country Club

North Augusta Golf and Country Club

The North Augusta Golf and Country Club is situated right off of Gregory Lake Road, just to the North of North Augusta proper. Another long-established club, it dates from 1962.

The Club as of this writing is going through a rebuilding era due to tragically losing their clubhouse by fire in the spring. They are building a bigger and better clubhouse that should be complete in early 2008. The new clubhouse will have banquet rooms, day care, a spa & fitness facility, and 6 court tennis area.

They also offer a really nice swimming pool in addition to the 18-hole golf course that features Bermuda greens. Memberships are very affordable, with monthly fees usually under $200/month, but count on an initiation fee as well.

You can’t buy homes ‘in the North Augusta Country Club’, but you can certainly buy homes nearby. The club itself is beginning work on a development called the Pinery, but ground has not broken at present. The newest development in the area is probably Bergen Place. If you want to find homes for sale near North Augusta Country Club, I’ll be happy to look for you, or you can try my Google Map Home Search.

The North Augusta Golf Club has been on a drive to increase their membership, and management is leading them to new and better things. With the new clubhouse in the pipe-line, the future looks very bright for North Augusta Country Club.

Additional Information:
North Augusta Golf and Country Club Website

Elegant Augusta GA Real Estate Resources:
Homes for Sale in Bergen Place

Other Golf Communities in the Area

There are 3 other South Carolina golf communities within easy driving distance of North Augusta: Mt. Vintage (an equestrian club located in Edgefield, SC), Pine Ridge (situated between Edgefield and Johnson), and Sage Valley (in Vaucluse, right off of Bettis Academy Road.)

There are 5 more golf clubs around Aiken, SC: Palmetto Golf Club, Aiken Golf Club, Woodside Plantation, Houndslake, and Cedar Creek.

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Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 19th, 2007

THE TALK

To the chagrin of hard working real estate professionals everywhere, the media has been publishing articles about the real estate bubble for more than a year now. From Newsweek to the New York Times, and from big blogs, to medium blogs, to little blogs, all you can hear is blather about the bubble.

What’s very frustrating about all this is that the National Real Estate Market is actually a patchwork quilt of many mini-markets. And to be fair, some of the sites I linked to above have a narrow focus, like the Irvine Housing Blog. While some markets like Irvine are indeed severely depressed, others have done quite well. However, with all the gloom and doom it’s easy to forget that the real estate business is difficult to generalize nationally. Much of what has been reported on have been the worst cases, or a selective look at national statistics; and that is unfortunate.

I can’t help but think that many homeowners have put off buying that retirement home, or moving close to Mom, for nothing more than fear of the real estate market. At what point does the bubble talk become self-sustaining?

I’d like to put to rest some of the uncertainty by putting forward my own picture of the Augusta Real Estate market. One based on facts and historical data. The unvarnished truth, as they say.

THE FACTS

A good place to begin gathering historical data on home sales is a Realtors’ MLS system. Otherwise known as Multiple Listings Systems, these databases allow real estate professionals to make data available on all their home listings to interested parties in a common area for data exchange. An agent or broker has to pay a yearly fee to gain membership to one of these exchanges. This means that a database might not show homes ‘sold by owner’ or listings from small real estate brokerages; but thats OK. Any data contained within a MLS system will comfortably indicate the minimum level of real estate activity in the region.

As an Augusta Realtor, I make sure I have access to the GAAR-MLS for my Augusta GA home search. The Greater Augusta Association of Realtors – Multiple Listing System, or GAAR-MLS, covers a huge 17 county swath of South Carolina and Georgia.

The markets in the coverage area for the GAAR-MLS are both rural and urban. For example, one county using this system is McCormick County, located in South Carolina. McCormick has less than 10,000 residents and barely 28 residents per square mile. It doesn’t get much more rural than McCormick County.

On the other hand, the city of Augusta, Georgia, has well over 200,000 residents alone. This makes it one of the largest cities in the state of Georgia.

The strong mix of markets & demographics across two states makes the GAAR-MLS ideal for looking at the state of the real estate bubble in the two-state. The graphic below shows the physical coverage of the GAAR-MLS system.

ABOVE: GAAR-MLS Coverage Area (Click picture for larger version)

I think the next step in studying the state of the real estate market is to select the data we want to look at- and in this case it’s pretty clear we are interested in residential real estate, as opposed to commercial or multi-family housing. The last step is to determine the time window. We need to get ‘before the bubble’ so data from 2004 to the present should be more than sufficient.

Here is that data from our MLS system from 2004 to the present (end-of-August, 2007). I have broken down the residential listings into two main categories. Residential listings consist of two sources: ‘resales’ or older homes that were or are occupied before the sale; and ‘new builds’ or ‘new construction’. The GAAR-MLS allows us the granularity we need to see each type.

(You can click images for larger versions)

You may be surprised to see that the growth in number of listings in 2006 and 2007 from previous years was spectacular – over 25% per year. That’s a whole lot of growth for an industry that was supposedly falling apart! Furthermore, we can see that while new construction was relatively static, the growth was fueled by Resale listings.

Resales are a great bell-weather for a local market. This is because they are an indication of the confidence level of existing homeowners in the area that they can recover their initial investment.

That last thought leads us to the next graphic I have to show you. Are homeowners recovering their initial investment? The media indicates that some homeowners have lost so much equity in their houses (due to deflated home values) that some people owe more on their mortgages than the home is worth! Well let us take a look:

(You can click images for larger versions)

Before I focus on what’s changing in this graph, let me address what doesn’t change. Right away it’s easy to see two metrics that have stayed more or less constant for the last 3 1/2 years: time on the market, and percentage of asking price. It’s generally accepted that the hotter the market, the less time it takes for inventory to sell, and in a cold market inventory takes forever to sell.

Since the time-on-the-market metric has not changed much, I submit to you, my loyal reader, that the market has not changed much either. Now, as for the % of asking price, generally sellers have gotten 98% of the original list, and it’s stayed that way. In a slow market, you might have to negotiate on price, but it’s apparent that not much of that is occurring here. In fact, sellers are getting almost all of what they are asking for.

OK, let’s take a look at that equity question. Are homes plummeting in value so fast that homeowners are sitting tight, hoping to make it through a bull market? Well, the answer is no, and no. I think we’ve addressed the fact that lots of homes are being put on the market- and sale prices have generally increased at approximately 6% per year. Home sale prices are an instant measure of home value. The homes have been put on the market and have sold for the highest dollar amount the market can provide. Home values are not slipping in the area covered by the GAAR-MLS.

MY CONCLUSION

We can talk a lot about local real estate markets, and national real estate markets. Lending practices, building practices, employment opportunities, demographics- they all play a role in building the economic playing field. Are there problems in this country with lending? Yes. Are some real estate markets experiencing a glut of slow-moving inventory? Yes. Are there a whole bunch of real estate flippers that got hurt? Of course. Does the automotive industry slowdown in the upper mid-west hurt the real estate market? Yes.

Is there a national real estate crisis? Of course not.

How is the Augusta real estate market doing? Just fine. Sellers are generally getting about 98% of their asking price. Their homes are gaining, on average, 6% value every year. And this is supported by the fact that an escalating number of homes are listed on the market every year.

So when considering the sale of a home or maybe buying a new property, take a look at your local real estate market. Many local Realtors maintain quick searches so you take a look at the real estate areas you are looking for. (Like this one for Evans Georgia Real Estate.) Ask your local board of Realtors how things are going. You might be surprised by the answer.

*I’d like to give special thanks to the Greater Augusta Association of Realtors, and my brokerage Meybohm Realtors, for sharing the data for this article.

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Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 18th, 2007

OK, now that I got you going with that title, I’m going to have to put up or shut up. (Hint: Since I’m filing this in the ‘fun stuff’ category, I think I’m safely off the hook.)

I found this website www.directhomefind.com that appears to have absolutely no real value, but hidden away I found a link that let me do this:

OK. Now that you know how my dream home would look, let me see yours!

You can design your own dream home here.

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Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 17th, 2007

I’ll open with an apology for missing last week’s numbers. I was on vacation in beautiful Charleston SC- blissfully away from any type of internet connection. I’m well rested now, and starting to get caught up with the inquiries that came in while I was out.

So without further ado, I’ll present this week’s residential home listings data and contrast that with my figures from September 4th. It’s easy to see a trend as listings are up in all areas that I measure.

Residential Real Estate Listings for the Augusta GA real estate market…

Richmond County: 1510 [+ 37]
Columbia County: 1216 [+ 32]

Aiken County: 512 [+ 11]
Edgefield County: 68 [+ 4]

Augusta, Georgia: 1179 [+ 28]
Evans, Georgia: 458 [+ 7]

North Augusta, South Carolina: 281 [+ 2]
Aiken, South Carolina: 127 [+ 11]

These numbers are for residential real estate (homes for sale). Listings obtained from NorthoftheSavannah.com’s feed from GAAR-MLS (The Greater Augusta Realtors-MLS). This data does not include commercial listings, lots and land, or multi-family housing. Numbers in brackets indicate change in # of listings from 2 week’s previous (September 4th).

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Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 13th, 2007

Historic Augusta Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving historical buildings in the Augusta area, has identified Harrisburg (the area that buffers the booming Summerville Real Estate market and downtown Augusta) as an area on their ‘endangered’ list.

This section of town has seen a steady decline over the last few years, yet the neighborhood still offers some great architecture. The best part is that these are homes that are reasonable to buy and fix.

One of the largest historic buildings in the Harrisburg section of Augusta is the Ezekiel Harris House built in the late 1700′s. Ezekiel Harris built Harrisburg as a city to rival Augusta in the tobacco market. The two areas were in fierce competition at the time. Over two hundred years later, Harrisburg has melted into the city of Augusta. For the complete article on the Historic Augusta inc. and Harrisburg endangered status follow this link to an Augusta Chronicle article about Harrisburg.

If you wish, you can take a look at the properties available in Harrisburg.

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Caroline Ashe Your Source in Augusta, GA Real Estate September 11th, 2007

This just in – we want to assure our loyal readers of the Elegant Augusta GA Real Estate Blog that we attempt to remove all unexploded ordinance from our homes before we sell them.

This is a service we provide to our clients at no charge.

Now you may be thinking to yourself right now, “What is she talking about? What home comes with explosives?” That is an excellent question. Take a look at this WIS-TV news story - you’ll see that some homes DO in fact come with live hand grenades.

This is where the Elegant Team takes over. Yes, we take the time to actually read those seller’s disclosures just in case explosive content is mentioned by the homeowner… It’s hard work – but someone has to do it. Sometimes the seller chooses to ‘forget’ about the problem. But when our inspector jots down ’2000lb bomb in basement’ – hey, we read the home inspection reports too. So you’re covered. We promise.

Unless you want your house to be da bomb. Then we certainly CAN help you find the right house.

This was a deliberate attempt at humor. While the content of this post was carefully checked for humorous content, some errors may occur. Not all humor works equally funny. Check with your doctor or medical professional if your sense of humor is missing.

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