BEACH NOTES ... 11/18/2009 ... Ocean City, New Jersey

LOOKING BACK ... LOOKING FORWARD from Ocean City, New Jersey

Part 3 ... The first two parts reviewed my reasoning for thinking about real estate by going back into past years and also by planning ahead for the next year.  I also covered some of the recent 10-year "sold property" history here in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Let's take a look forward into 2010.  In Ocean City we have returned to a two-part focus in terms of sales ... the spring buying period which covers late February through early June ... our most extensive sales effort of the year, and the fall buying period which covers September through late November ... our second major effort following the busy summer rental season.

Obviously, you can also see that we have two less attractive time frames ... the holiday month of December followed by two very cold months of the year, clearly an off-time for sales in Ocean City, New Jersey.  We also have the summer rental months which can often find you with potential buyers, but it becomes much more difficult to get into sale properties due to rental tenants.

When you consider the two breaks in the year, one can never be sure that the steam you had going into a break will remain when you start the next "buying period."  And based on the past two years, the fall buying period has not run a full course for the past two calendar years.  In other words, it is a shorter time frame and not nearly as buyer -directed as the spring time frame.  This represents a topic that should be reconsidered in one's future calendar planning for 2010.

Finally, you also have a number of buyers who don't follow the schedule as defined above.  They go according to their own schedule which may differ completely from one that you might want to do.  In particular, it is not as easy to make things work for all parties because many resort buyers run a course or timeline that may cover a one-to-five-year arrangement ... in other words, in a resort setting many buyers take a great deal of time in their pursuit of shore property here in Ocean City.

So we have now covered some of the established and not-so-established aspects of resort real estate when it comes to working with buyers within a scheduled time frame including the very busy summer rental season.  How can we provide for everyone in light of what has been described?                          dap