Time for a Place in the Country?
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/realestate/03cov.html?_r=1)
PERHAPS more than any place on earth, New York is a city of real estate fantasists. Imaginations soar with visions of an extra bedroom or even an extra closet, a terrace with a view, a kitchen large enough to entertain in, or the magnificent ways one might fix up that town house down the street.
Over the past couple of years, as the real estate market and the economy both sank, the abiding fantasy of some New Yorkers has been that the market will slip low enough to afford them a weekend house in the country.
(abiding 지속적인 변치않는)
A little shingled retreat near a lake. Or a chalet with tall windows and views of mountains. An herb garden. Adirondack chairs and a sloping lawn. A place to grill! Perhaps a swimming pool with a stone patio shaded by a grove of trees ...
Back to reality. Prices have fallen significantly, but given the lingering uncertainty in the economy, is now a smart time to buy a second home?
A look at some of the second-home markets near New York suggests that it might be a very promising moment. From Columbia County to the Jersey Shore, many properties are selling for significantly below their asking prices (which were already a good 20 percent lower than during the market’s peak) and sellers are accepting low offers — in some cases, very low.
Mortgages on second homes have always been more difficult to get than for primary residences, and lenders today are more stringent than ever. But for buyers who qualify, rates are so low that financing a second-home purchase may never be cheaper.
(stringent: 긴박한 절박한)
The big question, of course, is this: Will property values fall further, making a purchase now premature, or are prices — and interest rates — about to start turning up?
Brokers report that closings and showings are picking up — two signs of market health. “People have started to pull the trigger and make offers,” said Bill Sidoriak, the principal broker at Fleming Realty, which covers Ulster County, N.Y., and towns like Woodstock and Saugerties. Many buyers, he said, have never before owned a second home.
According to the New York State Association of Realtors, the number of resales of single-family homes (which includes primary residences as well as second homes) in Columbia County was up 36.3 percent the first half of this year compared with the first half of 2009, and prices edged up 4.1 percent during that period.
In Ulster County, the total number of sales grew 43.2 percent and prices grew 6.6 percent. In Suffolk County, on Long Island, which includes the Hamptons and the less pricey North Fork, the number of sales jumped 46.5 percent, but prices were down 0.8 percent.
“It seems like all of a sudden, in the last month and a half, people have been coming out of the woodwork and calling,” said Mary Beaton Stapleton, an associate broker at Halstead Property in the Hudson Valley. But, like some other brokers, she believes that properties continue to be overvalued. “I think the market still has a little bit of room to drop here,” she said, “whereas in New York City, I think it has bottomed out and now is starting to go up.”
A case in point: At Copake Lake in Columbia County, a new four-bedroom two-bath house with 4,421 square feet of space, cathedral ceilings, two stone fireplaces and a deck on three acres went on the market in April at $1.175 million. One month later, the seller dropped the asking price to $988,000. Just two weeks ago, he slashed it to $828,000. Ms. Stapleton said she advised him that the most recent reduction should have been to $795,000.
In Rifton, a hamlet in Ulster County, an 1825 two-bedroom farmhouse with five fireplaces on seven acres is listed at $299,000. The property, which has a detached studio, would easily have sold for $450,000 during the boom, Mr. Sidoriak said.
In Litchfield County, Conn., a former fishing cottage on Silver Lake in the town of Sharon languished on the market for four years.
The asking price in 2007 was $560,000. By this June it had dropped to $375,000. But there was little interest. A buyer from New York came along at the end of the summer and made an offer of $300,000. No dice. She then came up to $312,000. The seller took the deal.
Daniel Chen and Todd Kelly found they could negotiate on matters other than price. Mr. Chen, a graphic designer, and Mr. Kelly, an artist, who rent an apartment in Brooklyn, closed a couple of weeks ago on an 1890s farmhouse in Accord, an Ulster County hamlet less than two and a half hours from the city.
The property, which had been part of a farm, was listed at $389,000 when they saw it. Instead of haggling on price, the couple persuaded the seller to increase the package by five more acres, encompassing a pond and raising the total acreage to 19.27 from about 14.
In return Mr. Chen and Mr. Kelly paid a slightly higher price, $399,000. But it was still comfortably below the limit they had set for themselves, $450,000.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기