As Yachats-area housing market continues to heat up, agents and buyers scramble to find homes

 

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

The 33-year-old house sits near the south end of Yachats Ocean Road. It has two bedrooms, two baths and just 1,200 square feet of living space on 0.6 acres. There’s a detached single-car garage.

Outdated but well-cared for, the house has a killer view of the Pacific.

Its Portland owner put the property on the market a few weeks ago for $429,500. It sold in just two days with four prospective buyers bidding for it.

“It’s not always about the home,” said listing agent Joni Biron of Emerald Coast Realty in Waldport. “In this case it was the unique location. People want a view.”

The Oregon coast real estate market has been good for three years, but Realtors surveyed by YachatsNews.com say this may be the strongest since the recession of 2008-10.

The market for homes – full-time for retirees, as vacation homes and for workers – is being pushed by Baby Boomers from out-of-state or the Willamette Valley cashing out their family homes, low interest rates, a strong stock market, and the good economy.

“It’s no secret that the market is being pushed by retirees coming into the community with money,” said Freddy Saxton, a broker with Advantage Real Estate in Newport. “Prices have definitely climbed up there.”

That has also put extreme pressure on housing for the coast’s low-income workers who compete with out-of-towners to find an affordable place to buy or rent.

So a good property quickly attracting multiple offers is no longer unusual.

“Most brokers have buyers in their back pocket when something comes on the market,” said Paul Cohen, broker at Edgewater Realty in Waldport. “To be successful you’re going to have to be aggressive … and if you want a particular place you’re going to have to pay.”

Supply and demand

The “inventory” of single-family homes for sale in the 97498 Zip code that covers the Yachats area is low, real estate agents say.

There are 36 single-family homes in the 97498 Zip code on the market through the Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service, said D.J. Novgrad, a broker in the Yachats office of Emerald Coast Realty. Only one has a price below $200,000.

There were 72 single-family homes sold in the Yachats-area zip code during the past year.

There are 45 residential building lots for sale, according to MLS, and 38 have sold in the past year.

Saxton said the average list price of the Yachats-area homes on the market is $653,000 — twice the average price of homes for sale in Newport. That includes a $1.7 million house on Horizon Hill Road whose sale is in closing. “That says there’s not much inventory out there,” Saxton said, because the lower priced homes are being snapped up leaving the longer-to-sell expensive ones on the market.

“Yachats does command a premium when it comes to housing,” he said. “It used to be easy to find a nice house at $450,000, now all of those are above $500,000.”

So far this year, Lincoln County has issued nine building permits for new, single-family homes in Yachats. Three of the nine were in the KOHO planned community on the south edge of town where owner Dave Rieseck hopes to complete work on the development by the end of the year.

Cohen believes that while there are many building lots for sale, it takes a certain kind of buyer – someone with time and patience — to find a contractor and build a home.

“It’s can be tricky to find a good contractor and the good ones are very busy,” he said. “It takes a determined person to tackle that.”

Several of the Yachats-area building permits were for a developing trend – putting manufactured homes on bare lots. While in the end it’s not necessarily cheaper, Cohen says it’s quicker because manufactured home dealers make it easier by doing all the lot development and other finishing touches.

Historic motel properties on the market

There are six active commercial listings in the Yachats area, with two sales during the past 12 months.

One of the commercial properties on the market is the four-lot complex that comprises the Rock Park Cottage complex on West Second Street in downtown Yachats. A motel since the 1930s, its second-generation owners, Betsy Price of Yachats and Anne Quirk Bonn of Portland, simply want to retire.

The properties are on the market for $1.75 million through Dolphin Real Estate in Newport.

“It’s time to find new people to take over,” said listing agent Patrick Richardson. “Our ideal buyer would be someone who’d want to carry on the tradition … and not tear it down.”

The rustic motel has five attached cottages and one separate cottage, two long-term rentals on separate city lots and a larger 3-bed, 3-bathroom house that is licensed through the city as a vacation rental. However, unless the Yachats City Council changes rules on transfer of vacation rental licenses – which it is currently discussing – it would not automatically transfer to a new owner, according to city planner Dave Mattison.

While the listing says the property is made up of three tax lots and could be split and sold separately, Richardson said Price and Bonn would like to keep the property intact.

“It’s one-of-a-kind. It’s adjoining the state park. It’s in the heart of Yachats but not on Highway 101,” Richardson said. “What someone does to it is going to affect the whole community.”

 

What’s next?

Every property is different. Every buyer is unique. Every sale or purchase is driven by dozens of different factors. But real estate agents offer these observations:

Apart from Yachats: Waldport and Newport have more houses on the market and more lower-cost housing that makes it easier for working families to purchase. But despite the bigger supply, house prices in those town are also increasing steadily. Saxton said workers with stable Newport-area jobs in education, medical fields, or government generally quality for a $300,000 mortgage. But the average house is Newport is now listed at $329,000. Interestingly, agents are noticing an influx of buyers from Paradise, Calif., the 25,000-population northern California city which was destroyed by wildfire last August as homeowners there begin to get insurance settlements.

Still a good value: Although prices are rising, most real estate values on the central Oregon coast continue to cost less than similar properties in the Willamette Valley, Portland area or popular areas of the West Coast. The coast has, as history tells us, taken longer to recover from the recession. “They were first, we were second,” Cohen says of the valley. “We’ve always been a bargain compared to other areas.”

U.S. Highway 101: Increasing traffic is changing the nature of the coastal highway, pushing people – if they can afford it – farther from the road. Growing numbers of locals and tourists, Realtors say, should put pressure on local governments to maintain or improve other important infrastructure like secondary roads, parking and especially water systems.

Vacation rental purchases: Most real estate agents are cautious about taking sides in the debate over Yachats’ cap on vacation rental licenses. Yachats is growing in popularity and will always be favored by tourists and retirees. Without saying it’s good or bad, agents say not being able to buy a house in Yachats and use it as a vacation rental is definitely pushing some buyers to property in nearby unincorporated areas.

“It’s like squeezing a balloon,” says Cohen. “You squeeze it in one spot and it bulges out in another.”

The internet: The other big change when it comes to real estate is the internet. No longer do you have to drive up and down the road looking for “For Sale” signs. Now buyers come from everywhere, says Biron, because it’s easy to search for property on a computer. “The internet changed the whole game,” says Biron. “Because of the internet people now come from all over the world.”