Liftoff for Luxury Home Sales
Reposted from The New Mexican | January 1, 2018 | By Bruce Krasnow
When veteran Realtor Chris Webster took a phone call from a Texas couple who were coming to Santa Fe and wanted to see a luxury home in the foothills, the agent knew he would have to tell them the Parade of Homes award-winning property listed at $2.4 million was already under contract.
So Webster ended up showing another home — one listed by fellow Sotheby’s agent Ricky Allen — in what has become the highest-priced residential sale of 2017. The 50-acre Full Circle Ranch in Tesuque and adjacent to the Santa Fe National Forest ended up selling for over $5 million after being on the market less than three months.
It was one of just a handful sales of residential transactions over $4 million the past decade, according to Webster.
It was that kind of a year for high-end home sales as sellers benefited from a higher stock market, natural disasters in other parts of the United States, as well as the continuing appeal of Santa Fe as a culturally rich retirement community. “Santa Fe continues to be the drawing card,” said Webster. “It has so many dimensions.”
With the books now closed on 2017, it will go on record as the best for Santa Fe home sales in over a decade with closed sales in all price ranges up over 10 percent on the year, and the highest volume since 2006. The total dollar volume of sales in Santa Fe will reach $1 billion for the first time in 12 years, said Alan Ball, the qualifying broker with Keller Williams in Santa Fe who writes a blog about the residential market.
“We have made up nearly all of the ground lost over the last 10 years,” Ball said in his end-of-the year blog post.
But homes under $500,000 started to rebound three years ago as interest rates reached all-time lows and supply fell due to the lack of new construction. The high-end market — sales defined by $1 million and over — was still sluggish in 2014 and 2015 as many properties went on and off the market and some sellers accepting offers for less than they paid.
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