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Most real estate on the Outer Banks is sold to out-of-town owners. That tells you, up-front, something important about the real estate market: real estate agents, builders, lenders, lawyers and other service businesses are accustomed to working long distance. Any successful Outer Banks company has learned to use the mail, the phone and other electronic means to transact business. No matter how far away you are, your most difficult task will probably be no different than what it was at home. You'll need to decide which property best suits your needs.
Some Outer Banks buyers are simply looking to diversify their financial position while enjoying a favorite vacation spot; some want to secure a long-term vacation place for themselves and their families; and others intend to turn their investment into year-round homes at a later date. Each circumstance requires different criteria to make a successful decision.
If you're buying for "strictly investment," you can easily gather the needed information to determine ideal location, house configuration, amenities and other details that maximize cash flow and appreciation. Quantifying this decision makes sense because it is primarily a business decision.
If you're interested as much in the personal benefits of your investment as the financial ones, you'll have more to consider. In addition to financial considerations, you'll need to look at factors which make your personal vacations enjoyable and at the reasons you've chosen the Outer Banks as the location for this investment. That shouldn't be too hard a task; you've already done it.
But if you're buying property that you hope will someday be a year-round home, you'll have a much more difficult job separating the emotional appeal of vacationing >from the realities of day-to-day living. What works great for a week or two at a time can often be unbearably expensive or inconvenient in the long run.
Almost any real estate agent will tell you the key to a good real estate investment is location. But great vacation locations don't always translate into great living locations.
Living year-round on the oceanfront in a beach resort, for example, means paying vacation property prices and high-risk property insurance rates. It means dealing with the maintenance problems caused by harsh sand-filled winds and rough seas. It means living with environmental regulations that often severely limit how you improve your property.
On the oceanfront you have to accept that your back yard the beach is not yours (in North Carolina, the beach belongs to the public). And, short of building a serious fence around your property, you will probably find folks wandering through what yard you do have more frequently than if you lived off the waterfront. |
Living year-round in a neighborhood filled with vacation rental properties is another problem. As a vacationer, you may pay little heed to the comings and goings of other vacationers in a neighborhood. But once you're living somewhere year-round, constantly changing faces and traffic as well as vacation lifestyles out of sync with the workaday world can be disturbing. And what surrounds a neighborhood should be viewed in a different light. As a vacationer, you may consider close proximity to restaurants, shopping centers and recreational facilities a big plus. As a year-round resident, you're likely to be annoyed by lights, sounds and smells that assault your senses on a daily basis.
Generally speaking, westside neighborhoods (which run the gamut from heavily wooded to wide-open, high dunes) have more appeal for year-round living and less appeal for vacationers because of their distance from the oceanfront. Westside golf course or marina/canal properties are exceptions to that rule, attracting a good mix of both markets.
Construction style is just as important as location and, for the buyer thinking about eventual retirement, just as tricky. Reverse and elevated floor plans (typically, parking is on the ground floor, bedrooms are on the first floor above the ground and living rooms are on the second floor), although part of the Outer Banks ambience, are probably the relocation buyers biggest downfall. They want views, they want the vacation "style," but they let the romance of resort living get in the way of practical considerations.
In some locations, an elevated floor plan is a necessary safety precaution against flooding. Reverse floor plans maximize views. But if you're looking at the long-term use of property you need to consider how you'll feel about climbing at least one flight of stairs to get to the kitchen or to carry out the trash day in and day out. Will guests and family members be able to navigate all those stairs? With reverse floor plans, also think about the implications of putting your living space over your bedrooms and having guests enter the house on the bedroom floor.
Thousands of Outer Banks residents have the made the transition from vacationer to year-round resident, from investing in a lifestyle for financial reasons to investing in a community for personal ones. If you're going to make that switch, the key to choosing the right property will be your ability to appreciate the resort market without letting it cloud your judgment. Once you've made your choice, the rest will be easy.
Chris Kidder has been writing about Outer Banks real estate for more than 11 years. She is a real estate columnist for The Virginian-Pilot and her work appears in national and regional magazines.
This article has been reprinted by permission from the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce |