Push for Second Homes Transforms Once Remote Areas
Buyers' Plans for Retirement, Vacations Drive Market Boom
Tom Meggers and Linda Hunt of Naples, Fla., are thinking of relocating permanently to Murphy, N.C., where they have vacationed for years. "We like the climate," Hunt says.
(By Chuck Burton -- Associated Press)
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Saturday, August 13, 2005
MARBLE, N.C. -- On a hillside at the remote western tip of North Carolina, real estate agent Joey Reid is showing off the next big thing in this area's booming market for vacation and retirement homes.
With 10-foot ceilings, stone fireplaces and screened decks with a mountain view, homes at Black Rock Falls are expected to fetch prices from $300,000 to $500,000. Owners will share access to a natural waterfall, adjoining trails and a clubhouse overlooking the falls.
"It's a baby boomer's playground," said Reid as he walked a visitor through the first house in the development, currently under construction.
Black Rock Falls will be the first upscale vacation development in this town where modest vacation homes now sell for $160,000 to $250,000, a four hour-plus drive from Charlotte, N.C.
Across the country, previously unheralded communities are being transformed by a boom in second-home purchases fueled by demographics, cheap loans and a real-estate market some believe is in a bubble.
Atlantans priced out of the hot northern Georgia mountains and Floridians disillusioned by that state's rampant growth are behind the boom in Marble and nearby Murphy, N.C.
In Oregon, low interest rates and high equity in the San Francisco Bay area have drawn many retirees and second homeowners to white-hot Ashland, a perennial on various best-places-to-live lists.
And in scenic Paonia, Colo., vacation homes are attracting buyers with prices that are half those of comparable dwellings in Snowmass or Aspen, where a one-bedroom condo was listed for $370,000.
"We say the billionaires pushed the millionaires out of Aspen and they ended up in Carbondale," former mayor and Paonia native Ron Rowell said, referring to another trendy Colorado second-home destination. "Now they've been driven over here."
Nationally, a record 2.82 million second homes sold in 2004 -- 1.8 million as investments and just over 1 million as vacation homes -- a 16.3 percent increase, according to the National Association of Realtors. In all, 36 percent of all homes purchased in 2004 were either for investment or vacation.
Three factors are driving the surge, said Jeff Lyons, general manager for the Charlotte-based Web site http:/
Those historically low rates, combined with expanding wealth among the upper ranks of American workers -- itself often a result of home equity built up due to the hot real estate market -- have made second homes that were once a luxury a reality for more people. And baby boomers are trading the home equity built up in high-priced cities for retirement in cheaper towns.
