Results from airpark buying & selling survey

The Living With Your Plane survey on buying and selling residential airpark properties didn’t bring as many individual responses as we had hoped for but several of the ones we received apparently included both a purchase and sale.

And, in the case of some real estate professionals, multiple sales were recorded on the same form. For example, one real estate professional indicated the sale of two homes and six lots during the last year. The end result is that it appears we received information on about 35 to 40 transactions.

Our survey was designed to discover whether residential airpark properties were suffering a sales slowdown like much of the residential market in many areas of the country. We also sought information on how long a property had been on the market, how the asking and selling price compared, the price range of the property and whether there were plenty of lookers for the property.At least 20 undeveloped lots were reported sold among the transactions reported. An airpark home with hangar (whether it was integrated into the house or a separate structure), came in second with at least half a dozen sales reported while homes or hangar only sales were considerably less, two in each category.

The purchase price for 28.6 percent of the properties was less than $100,000 and a like percentage reported a price of $100,001 to $200,000. Another quarter of the respondents claimed a transaction at the $200,001 to $350,000 category. Three sales were reported in the $350,001 to $500,000 class, There was one reported sale each at $500,001 to $750,000 and $750,001 to $1 million.

Survey respondents reported the property they were involved with was on the market for longer than a year in just under 40 percent of the cases. In contrast, 32 percent said their properties were listed for less than 3 months. Five properties were listed from 3 to 6 months and another three places were sold in 7 to 12 months.

The survey asked buyers how many properties they had visited before making a deal. Nearly 80 percent of the buyers reported visiting 1 to 5 properties before deciding which one to purchase. Another 16 percent reported visiting more than 10 properties in their search for the perfect residential airpark property.

Financing the purchase was primarily with cash. Eleven survey respondents (58%)reported paying cash for their purchase while almost 37 percent said they used conventional or VA financing. Only one reported the seller financed the deal.

Needless to say, with that high a percentage paying cash, the financing aspect of the deal was extremely simple for most people.

Sellers had a somewhat different view of the number of visitors to their property. Nearly 37% said their property was viewed by 1 to 5 prospects. There were 6 to 10 visitors at 45.5 percent of the airpark properties sold and over 18 percent of those completing the survey as a seller said they had more than 10 visits to study their property.

When the property was sold, there were four equal segments of reductions from the asking price. A quarter of the respondents said they cut the price less than $10,000; a second quarter had to reduce their asking price between $10,000 and $25,000 while a third quarter took a $25,000 – $50,000 markdown. The final group reported slashing the price by more than $100,000 to make the sale.

Although we have no way of knowing one way or another, we assume this larger price cut was related to a home sale at the upper end of the price schedule.

Finally, 45 percent of transactions were made utilizing a real estate professional and 55 percent claimed they did not use a real estate salesperson.

The responses came from Arizona. California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

One Florida individual said it was his opinion that seller prices in his area had dropped about 20 percent. “However, most sellers are not panicking or dropping prices and seem confident things will be moving after the election in November.”

As a result of the survey responses, it appears to us that residential airpark properties – homes with integrated hangars, stand-alone home and free standing hangars – all continue to sell at about the same rate they have been for the last few years. The amount of time on the market and the number of folks checking the properties out also seems to be about the same as previosuly reported. It doesn’t appear that the sub-prime market meltdown has had any effect on the fly-in community.

The number of properties sold and the length of time they stay on the market seems to be more a condition of the number of possible buyers in any particular section of the country rather than anything else. There just aren’t as many individuals looking to buy a home on a residential airpark as they are folks interested in living on a golf course, as a comparison.