Open House Alert! 188 East Genesee Street

188 East Genesee Street

 OPEN SUNDAY, August 21st
            12:00 to 2:00
            ML#S358766

The sunroom

The attic

The Third Twenty - May 15th through July 15th

How lovely to walk through the Village early this morning on my way to the office and floor time.  It was a moving post card:  the hanging flower pots, Legg Hall's beautiful brick walls, the height of M&T bank.  A woman in a flowered, flowing dress walker her little dog towards Thayer Park.  A remembered video in my head.

So here they are, in an order I bet no one will figure out.....

4723 Jordan Road        Town            $100,000

12 Heritage Woods       Village         $353,400

767 Sheldon Road         Town             $72,000

50 State Street               Village           $950,000

1055 Butters Farm         Town             $556,102

102 Orchard Road          Village           $529,000

2 Ramble Wood             Village           $517,500

10 Academy Street         Village           $385,000

1014 Autumntree  Ct.      Town            $372,000

26 State Street                 Village           $350,000

2074 East Lake Rd.         Spafford         $290,000

4205 Jordan Road           Mottville         $205,000

55 Onondaga Street         Village            $133,500

4499 Jordan Road            Town               $76,500

1254 Oak Bluff                Town               $285,000

2360 West Lake Rd.       Town                $280,00

3908 East Street              Town                $252,500

2536 East Lake Rd.         Town               $186,000

863 Milford Drive           Town               $253,000

2450 East Lake Rd.         Spafford           $345,000

Skaneateles Real Estate - The Up Late Watching the Convention Issue

So I am tired....and I am going out to show a property at 6;30 tonight.  Then on to the lake, to sleep, I hope!  Tomorrow an old friend is coming into town for about 24 hours and I want to be ready to run around and do things in this beautiful weather.

The update:  There are currently 77 single family homes in the Skaneateles area of the multiple listing system, of which 37 (such a high number!) are in the Village.  Only 16 are considered waterfront....(and more about that later.)

Fifteen of the listings are new.  Eight are in the Village and 2 are new waterfront listings.

There are 24 homes waiting to close in the under contract category.  Ten of these just sold in the past 35 days since my last update.  That's pretty good considering the temperatures were above 80 most of the time, and going out to look at houses can be a very sticky business.

We now have 61 sold and closed single family homes this year.  Hooray!  On my next stint in the office I will write and publish the Third Twenty.  We are doing quite well!

About those waterfront properties....I was showing waterfront homes on Owasco Lake and ran into a fellow Realtor who does most of his business over there.  I commented that there were twice as many lakefront listings on Owasco than on Skaneateles, even though the lake is much smaller.  He disagreed....said there about 100 on Skaneateles.  Since all this was playing out in front of my clients, I allowed that I may have been mistaken.  As of today, there are 23 - only 23! - waterfront listings on all of Skaneateles Lake according to the multiple listing service.  Of these, 9 are priced at a million or more.  Owasco Lake has 45 listings.  

The upshot of this is that there is such low inventory.  Or so it seems.  When I first started 15 years ago it was worse...very few homes came on the market.  Everyone had long lists of buyers, and when a property appeared it was a race to bring them in to see it and potentially write an offer.  We are not quite there yet....the prices are so much higher than 2001 when there was only one 'real" million dollar house.  The higher the prices, the fewer the people who can afford them of course.  Just a discussion on a lazy afternoon in the Village.  Your thoughts are welcome!

New Listing! 8805 Horton Street

It's been exactly a month since I was able to write this blog.  So many sales, closings, almost sales and almost closings, and now new listings.  I hope to make up for the lack of writing over the next week.

Horton is a little (936sf) home in the Village of Weedsport.  The seller bought it a few years ago and it was a mess!  Over the course of the past years she and friends have renovated it beautifully.  You can see from the photos above that the kitchen and bathroom are virtually new.  Yes, those are cherry cabinets.  The light fixtures in the full bath are quite lovely (I like the dining room lights best though).  The bottom photo is a view of the upstairs bedroom.  When it was purchased, there were two small bedrooms.  Now it's all one big one that takes up the second story along with storage.  In order to improve it, the seller tore out the old stairs and put in new ones.

Things I like:  

The laundry is located on the insulated back porch - so, first floor laundry!

There is a garage.  How handy!

The yard is fairly private and no house is between it and Route 34.

There's an island in the kitchen that provides more counter space and a place to sit and talk to "the cook."

The sunporch needs a bit of work still, but it's all windows on two sides and has a natural wood ceiling.

There are windows everywhere!

The price is $62,000......amazing!  Definitely cheaper than renting!


Take a look - drive through pretty Weedsport.  Horton is sort of on the way out of the south end of the Village, but you can certainly walk into town for ice cream, maybe an antique at the Purple Monkey, or a coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.  (ML#S357862 for even more photos and comments.)

When I was single and living on my own, I rented a carriage house in Syracuse.  Absolutely loved it...and this reminds me of it.  So, investors, maybe you could lease it out to another young person who wants to be on her own?

Skaneateles Real estate - The Mid-Year Update

I was going to write about the places we've been lately, but then I realized that it had been a long time -  May 25th - since I had written an update. Could be because we've been places....hmmmm...
Anyway, without further ado....

There are currently 77 active listings in the Skaneateles area of the multiple listing service.  Of these, 30 are in the Village and 15 are considered waterfront.  Think about that....this whole entire (gorgeous) lake that I can see while sitting here and typing, has only 15 listings?  I haven't heard the usual question about why there are so many "For Sale" signs on East Lake Road.  There aren't any!  It's rather amazing, but goes right along with the low inventory complaint.  Overall, there are 3 homes listed under $100,000 and 10 over a million.  The median is $365,000.

Twelve of the listings are new since the end of May.  Only one is a re-list of a property, which is unusual but indicates that homes are selling, rather than sitting. 

Twenty-five are under contract, waiting to close.  Five of these are under $100,000 and only one is over a million.  The median is $295,000, notably less than the active 365k median.   Six are newly under contract since the last update.

We now have 50 sold and closed single family homes in the Skaneateles area in 2016.  Two are under $100,000 and 5 are over one million.  The median list price is $325,000.  This sold and closed number is just above where we were last year at this time.

Recently I've been working with buyers looking for homes in Skaneateles - waterfront and elsewhere - plus others in Camillus and Marcellus.  I've also sold a home in Auburn.  As we have looked, I have realized that homes are going quickly, but extremely quickly in Camillus especially.  So I checked the statistics today.

Remember, Skaneateles has about a three to one ratio of active to under contract homes (77 to 25).  Turns out that Marcellus is more like two to one (29 active, 14 under contract.)  Auburn is an accelerated market also: 104 active to 67 under contract.  But Camillus!  Oh my!  They have only 86 active listings and 99 under contract!  Wow!  I've never seen anything close to that in Skaneateles. Ever.

Now let's take it a step further.  I checked on the population of these towns.  As you may know, Skaneateles comes in around 7,200.  Marcellus is smaller with 6,200 good souls.  The City of Auburn now has 27,000 or so people.  Camillus, although larger in physical size, has 24,000 people.

So although Camillus is over 3 times larger than Skaneateles, it has close to the same number of active listings and four times as many homes under contract.  Why?  If you have an idea, please write to me at mbrooks@bhhscnyrealty.com. 

Gas & Grass

I love grabbing my readers' attention!

Last weekend an old friend came through Syracuse for a memorial service.  We went to school together way back when and reconnected around our last reunion.  He was from my "hood" and we shared that.  He is also a Realtor in Colorado.

We had lunch at The Sherwood on Sunday.  He'd been away so long he honestly didn't know where it was, except that it was in Skaneateles!  Now he does, and the lunch awakened memories of his mother bringing him and his brother and sister to the Village for a day away from our Westcott Nation neighborhood.  Even back then people loved Skaneateles. 

We talked about this and that, what people were doing, whom we had seen recently.  Then he told me about courses he had taken for continuing education to keep up his license.  One of them was about marijuana, and how to handle the new law in his state and the ramifications of it for real estate.

I had just seen a house that most likely had been used as a "grow" house, at least according to a code enforcement officer.  We smelled something as I turned the key in the lock, and then realized what it was when we saw the lightbulbs.  So how is that disclosed?

In Colorado it should be done, he was told.  It's beyond belief to me that there could possibly be a part of the state disclosures that asks:  "How many plants have been kept in the house?"  "Are there still plants on the property?  If so, what are their locations?"  I am imagining, I don't know.

How does a Realtor handle walking into a house that openly displays plants?  You are allowed - it is legal - to have two producing, mature marijuana plants in your home, and two immature, non-producing (at the time) plants.  There is no reason to hide them.

On his way to an appointment he saw the Gas & Grass station and took the photo I reproduced at the top of this blog, and sent it to me.  It's also hard to believe that grass is still illegal in parts of this country, and that people are fined or even go to jail over it.  As he says, "Colorado is just different than New York."  That it is.

Open House Alert! 3681 Causeway Road

This is a photo I took a few years back of the beach on the south side of the Causeway that runs (used to run, really) across Otisco Lake.  This area is a couple minutes' walk from 3681 Causeway Road, the home I am holding open this Sunday (June 12th).

When the seller bought the cottage a while back we were told there were lake rights.  Many of the homes in the area had them written into their deeds.  Everyone used the beach, cleaned up after themselves, and generally took care of it.  Presumably the original seller had also.  Unfortunately there is nothing written in the deed, but traditionally there are no issues.  It's a small community, and even with written permission from some long ago owner it would not be acceptable to treat the beach poorly.  Isn't it lovely?  Imagine those hills in the fall.  As someone said recently, "Just being near the water is calming."

The cottage is also serene.  As you can see, at some point an old porch was enclosed to create this lovely great room with the vaulted ceiling, supported by those beams.  You are looking at it from the kitchen...a small table on the right side looks out at the lake.  Although the house itself is small, it has three bedrooms. One of them is upstairs and actually has a balcony.

I went back and looked at my notes.  We - the seller and I - first put it on the market in 2007 when she realized that her move was too far to make it a practical commute or even weekend retreat.  When it didn't sell after a couple months, she was approached about renting it.  The people ended up staying for years, they liked it so much!  Since then we've tried to sell it a couple more times, but the home rents easily, the mortgage gets paid, and the tenants treat it kindly.

This time she would like to sell it, so we started early.  The price is $59,000.  "Really?" you ask.  "Yes, really!"  I say.

Let's do the math.  Say you put down 10%...that's $5,900, but let's call it $6,000.  You will then finance $54,000.  Amortized over 30 years, at 4%, your payments will be $257.80 per month.  Taxes are about $3000 per year, so add a monthly $250 escrow.  Insurance too....another $50 per month...Rounding again you owe $550 monthly.  This is without the STAR tax discount, without appealing the assessment, and without taking into account the tax benefits of a mortgage.

Clearly this 3-bedroom home so close to the water is a very good deal.

So come this Sunday between noon and 2:00 and see the home and give it a good thought.  It's in Tully School District....the marina is just around the corner within walking distance....you can get to Syracuse or Auburn within 45 minutes, Cortland in only 30 minutes.  And when you get home, relax on your very own deck!