Lake Norman Luxury Home Market Report

One of the greatest challenges there is when doing an analysis of the luxury home market, whether in Mooresville, Lake Norman, Charlotte or Beverly Hills, is to determine exactly what price range to use. If you look at many real estate ads in our Lake Norman area brokers will include anything above $750,000 or even less.

Here in Lake Norman we have another element to consider when determining the true luxury home price range; whether the home is on a waterfront lot, has a waterview or golf course view lot or neither. Generally speaking (all price ranges), waterview homes sell for about $150 per square foot and a waterfront home sells for about $300 per square foot. Of course, it depends on the quality of the water…is it deep water with views of the “main channel” of Lake Norman, or is it down one of the myriad small coves with shallow water and limited views of the actual lake?

For the sake of this Lake Norman market report, I am going to separate the estates in to three price points: $900,000+, $1,500,000+ and $2,000,000 as I think these are separate and distinct niches. All figures are bases on today, March 10, 2008 and are from the Charlotte Regional MLS:

$900,000 – $1,499,999

Active listings= 166
Active waterfront listings = 117 (70% of the listings are waterfront)
Active non-waterfront listings = 49
$ per square foot of active waterfront listings= $278
$ per square foot of active non-waterfront listings = $226
Number of listings sold in the past year = 94
Number of waterfront listings sold in the past year = 64 (68% of sales were waterfront properties)
Number of non-waterfront listings sold in the past year = 30
$ per square foot of waterfront listings sold = $271
$ per square foot of non-waterfront listings sold = $220

$1,500,000 – $1,999,999

Active listings = 75
Active waterfront listings = 68
$ per square foot of active waterfront listings = $308
Number of listings sold in the past year = 27
Number of waterfront listings sold in the past year = 25
$ per square foot of waterfront listings sold = $285

$2,000,000

Active listings = 53
Active waterfront listings = 51
$ per square foot of active waterfront listings = $421
Number of listings sold in the past year = 16
Number of waterfront listings sold = 15
$ per square foot of waterfront listings sold = $362

Summary:

It is interesting to note that at the $2,000,000+ price range all but two listings were waterfront. The only exception that I see to this would be some special property with considerable acreage like a gated Equestrian Farm on 15+ acres currently on the market in Huntersville for $2,870,000.

Note the progressive shrinking of the number of solds versus active listings as the prices increase. At the $2 million plus range only 16 properties sold in the past 12 months and there are 53 active listings. If this rate of sales were to continue we would have about a 40 month supply of listings on hand!

The highest sale in the past year on Lake Norman according to our MLS was $4,200,000; a 12,482 square foot waterfront estate in Cornelius. All of the rest of the 15 sales were below $3,000,000. About half of these sales were in Mooresville in The Point and the other half were in Cornelius.

We currently have 18 listings over $3 million on up to $10,500,000 yet we only had one sale in this highest price range in the past year.

Clearly, our highest end luxury home sales have been extremely slow. Some of these listings have been on the market as much as 2 years!

However the properties right about $1 million are actually relatively strong even compared to the entire Mooresville and Lake Norman home sales and current inventory.

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