Snapshots From Around the Region

May 20, 2016

Little Traverse: Cottage Buyers Wanted

Real estate is rebounding in the Little Traverse region, but the second-home market, which is critical, is slowing the recovery somewhat.

“We have low interest rates. We live in a beautiful part of the world. And people want to be here,” said Wally Kidd, of Kidd & Leavy Real Estate in Petoskey. “We will always be a highly sought-after area.”

Kidd said sales of vacation properties tend to slow in election years because people get skittish about money.

“I think it’s more psychological, from what I’ve gathered over the years,” Kidd said. “It’s change, and people are careful about change in the world.”

Kidd, whose family spent summers on Walloon Lake for four generations, moved there full-time in 1991 and built his business around the region’s appeal to newcomers.

“We vacationed here on Walloon Lake, we summered here, and I hated leaving,” Kidd said. “I literally hated leaving. So my wife and I talked, and we moved here.”

Despite all of the advantages the Little Traverse region boasts, Kidd said the market remains tied to a national economy that’s become more and more uncertain, and that concerns him.

“There are no trends anymore — they are very short term,” he said. “Today we glean from data from a year or two, where, before, we looked back 10 years. We don’t have that luxury anymore.”

Petoskey has seen a shift toward increased demand for in-town living, Kidd said, but added that it’s not like Traverse City, where high-density developments have concentrated people downtown and created an urban feel.

While in-town living in Petoskey has gotten more popular, it’s just one segment of the wider market around Little Traverse.

“Petoskey really hasn’t had that. We’re dealing with the traditional homes — the older homes — that are really just full of character,” Kidd said. “Traverse City, to us up here, is a much bigger town.”

Both places, however, now draw professionals who have discovered they can live anywhere while keeping their day job, and that’s created a new home-buying customer in the last few years.

“Who wouldn’t want to live in downtown Petoskey, or Traverse City for that matter, and look out over the bay?” Kidd said.

Warming Up in Cadillac

Perhaps no northern Michigan city experienced the recession like Cadillac.

A slew of underwater mortgages and foreclosures made the market there plunge, said Sheila Richardson, owner/ broker at Exit Realty of Greater Cadillac and treasurer of the Paul Bunyan Board of Realtors.

“We probably felt the crash a lot worse than some of the surrounding areas, as far as property values,” Richardson said.

She said the market is beginning to pick up, but it’s slow going.

“There is a turnaround — prices are stable, they have not risen drastically — but those properties that are being put on the market are seeing a quick sale,” Richardson said.

Obstacles to getting mortgages have been reduced, and people who filed for bankruptcy or lost their home in the recession, unable to secure a mortgage for three to seven years, are slowly returning to the market.

Despite the rebound, a lot of the movement in Cadillac’s housing market is sideways.

“Everybody has to have a place to live, and every day there’s going to be a real estate transaction of some sort, because of birth or a death or a transfer or retirement — you have to live some place,” Richardson said. “But as far as someone moving up, I’m not seeing a lot of that in the Cadillac area.”

A bright spot is the second home and investment property market, which is beginning to see new life.

That makes sense, she said, because there are a lot of good deals around Lake Cadillac and Lake Mitchell right now.

Hope Comes to Gaylord

Realtor Donna Stubenvoll has seen something recently that she hadn’t seen in a while in Gaylord: hope and optimism about the market.

“Really, I’m not concerned anymore, you know?” Stubenvoll said. “For a few years, it was very scary. Were we all going to be able to make it?” Things looked bleak as prices fell year after year. Foreclosures dominated the market. There were too many sellers and not nearly enough buyers. In the last year or so, things started to change.

“We were in a declining market for very, very long time, and we are now starting to come out of it,” Stubenvoll said. “It’s getting to be where we need more listings. Inventory is dwindling, and we don’t have many homes on the market.”

Stubenvoll said the hottest part of the market around Gaylord right now is at entry level, or homes under $130,000.

She said that even though Gaylord is at the heart of the- Up North vacation region, only 10 percent of her business comes from second homes. She said 80 percent of customers are looking for their primary home, and 10 percent are looking to invest.

Still, Gaylord’s housing market, she said, is driven by the downstate housing market and whether people from southern Michigan are looking to buy cottages in the north.

“We’re a tourist area, and if somebody is afraid they’re going to lose that primary home, they’re dumping the secondary home or they’re letting it go into foreclosure. That’s what was happening to us,” Stubenvoll said. “With the job market down there now, they’re feeling more secure…and saying, ‘We can buy that second house now.’” At the same time, locals and recently arrived yearround residents are getting into the housing market.

“Things are looking up here in Gaylord,” she said. “Our unemployment is down, and that means a lot. We’ve got new businesses coming in here in Gaylord, and with all of that going on, it’s going to pull more people in to buy the homes.”