Big Bear Lakefront Information

Lakefront Sales in 2009 in Big Bear Lake

Average List Price in 2009: $1,411,285
Average Sales Price in 2009: $1,303,290
Average List Price/Sales Price Ratio in 2009: 92%
Average Sold Price/Square Foot: $464.14/sqft
Average Days on Market in 2009: 228 Days

A couple of things to point out:

• Days On Market can be ambiguous.  For instance, the house on Waterview that just got reduced from $1,800,000 to $999,900…The MLS shows days on market to be 314.  Really it’s been on the market slightly longer than that.  The seller first put the home on the market on 12/18/2008, but took it off the market for 2 months and re-listed it as a new listing.  Therefore, the number of days went back to 0 and the system considered it a new listing.  A lot of sellers do this when they don’t want the days on market to look so long.  There’s a little bit of gamesmanship going on through our MLS to try and manipulate the numbers.  What’s interesting is the fact that Waterview has been on the market for over a year…no activity.  They dramatically drop the price on Friday and on Monday they have 5 offers!  So no activity for the first year or so, and as soon as they drop the price, everyone is standing in line to make an offer.  The numbers still show over 1 year that it took to sell, but it really took a weekend once they priced it aggressively.
• 208 N Eagle, 42020 Eagles Nest, 200 N Eagle, and 811 Peninsula were all bought by the same buyer.  These are all transactions on the upper end of the market which I feel have slightly inflated the higher end of the lakefront market. You take out these four cash sales and you’re left with the following numbers:  (9) sales under $1m; (6) sales between $1m -$1.5m; (4) sales between $1.5m – $2m; and (1) sale over $2m.  The $2.1m sale was on an acre and a half of land at the end of Eagle Point so it was a rare property and deserving of the $2.1m price tag.  The true high end last year was really around $1.6m.  No one, other than the buyer who bought all of the properties listed above, wanted to be in the $2m range.
• List Price to Sales Price Ratio is slightly skewed as well.  Take for instance the sale on Willow Landing.  It was reportedly on the market for 1 day and sold for full price.  What really happened is the buyer and seller agreed upon the price but the house was never offiicially on the market, so the numbers look stronger than a traditional sale when in fact there was never any marketing involved in order to try and get it sold.  Or take the listing on Waterview that has 5 offers.  That will end up recording above the asking price.  My gut feeling tells me with 5 offers it’s going to sell in the $1,050,000 range.  If so, it’s going to look like it sold for 105% of the list price ($999,900), when most of us will remember a home that was listed at $1.8m all year that dropped the price 44% for a quick sale and got over the new list price…not the original list price.
• Price per Square Foot still isn’t the best way to value lakefront property up here.  Yes, you can take the average, the mean, or the median, but the numbers skew from $1008/sqft down to $165/sqft.  So throw that out the window.  As I’ve stressed in the past, the depth of the water, the view, amount of lake frontage, and wind protection should all play a factor in determining the value of a waterfront property in Big Bear Lake.