Between my cashed in kitchen passes and Thanksgiving break, it has been a while since my last post. I tried to keep the Lake Martin Voice “A” students informed with my Twitter updates, which are visible at the bottom right margin. I am enjoying using my Twitter account as a micro blog, a way to quickly update the world or link in to interesting articles or info from other bloggers.
Over Thanksgiving I mostly stayed away from the computer. I caught up on reading the WSJ. I helped my kids swing on a vine in the woods. I read a bunch of good books about Alabama and the greater Lake Martin area. It was glorious. As a side note, I have created a Lake Martin Voice Library page. Here I will post links to various books that I think the average fan of Lake Martin would like. I promise to keep it on point, refusing to indulge myself with too many books on too many topics. I will try to limit it to a.) Lake Martin history, and b.) real estate in general. If any of you have any suggestions, please leave a comment on the Library page and help us all out.
You out of towners should consider a visit to your Lake Martin home in between now and Christmas. If you have never been here when the leaves are gone, you’re missing a treat. Everything looks different (in a good way). Almost no one is here, so it is incredibly peaceful. Plus there are some things going on like opening of Catherine’s Market at Russell Crossroad, and shopping in downtown Alex City.
One of the great things about working around Lake Martin is that occasionally you bump into some really crazy folks. The other day I met Kyle Walton and a bunch of his buddies who are professional wakeskaters and /or wake boarders.
My family recently moved to a new-to-us home (fyi my “old” home sold in 2 days). The new home is on a septic tank system, whereas the old one was tied in to the sewer system of the City of Montgomery. This got me to thinking about a claim my father has long made, that is, those “flushable” wipes they sell these days may be flushable, but they are bad for septic systems as they do not properly disintegrate like toilet paper does.
I did some research, then an experiment. The results made me immediately think about homeowners on Lake Martin, as I would hazard a guess that 99% of waterfront homes on Lake Martin are on some sort of septic system.
THE EXPERIMENT: Do “flushable” wipes degrade like toilet paper?
Modus: Following the suggestion from this site, I took 3 separate Tupperware boxes, filled them halfway with water. In one I placed a ball of our walmart brand toilet paper (as a control to disintegration). In another I put 1 walmart brand flushable wipe. In the last I put 1/2 a square of our walmart brand paper towel (as a control to non-disintegration). I put the tops on, and shook all of them vigorously.
Results:
Click here for my blog Lake Martin Voice to see the results, and read my tounge in cheek recommendations to deal with life on septic......
In the November issue of Lake Magazine - Lake Martin Edition - Nikki Reeves sent out an email to interview local real estate agents. The topic was the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Lake Martin Area Association of Realtors (LMAAR). She also interviewed the past presidents of LMAAR about the past, present, and future of the Lake Martin real estate area. You can click on the above link to read the other folks’ quotes.
Of course, I am never shy about supplying my honest thoughts. I sent an email to Nikki with the below. The part that she used is highlighted in yellow. After reading the article, I can see why she didn’t use the other parts of my quotes. They wouldn’t have fit in with the tenor and tack of the others.
Here’s the text of my email:
Nikki-
some thoughts on LMAAR’s 20th anniversary:
PAST:
“It’s a funny coincidence that 20 years ago, as LMAAR was formed, the U.S. was in the middle of a different bank bailout - the Savings and Loan Crisis. It roiled the credit industry and hammered real estate, making a lot of people panic and expect the worst and wonder if real estate would ever ‘come back.’ Well, it did. Except for a slowdown in the late 90s, real estate roared until 2005 or so.”
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:
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?
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.
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:
I was over in the Pleasure Point area the other day, going by two homes for sale that I have listed over there. One is on Claytons Lane and the other in on Captains Road.
If you are ever riding around in that section of Blue Creek, off of Tallapoosa County Road 34, you might find it interesting that there is an old cemetery off of, you guessed it, Old Cemetery Road.
John Coley
;)
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