Dropped price by a million

From the Destin Log




Seller cuts price of house by $1 million
By Jim Wagner
June 27, 2007 4:07 AM

FOR SALE: This sign on Calhoun Avenue shows the seller?s price reduction of $1 million.A Destin doctor who has had his pulse on the Destin real estate scene for more than 30 years has slashed the asking price of his bayfront home by $1 million.
Now, the home that Darlene and Dr. Mike Raim live in carries a listing price of $1.79 million. It was $2.79 million.
?We?re trying to get someone?s attention ? shock value,? Raim said in an interview.
Raim bought the house at 619 Calhoun Ave. in 1981 and said he paid $131,000. It was built in 1972 and has undergone a couple of remodels, he said. It?s 2,700 square feet, has three bedrooms, two full baths and sits on 1 acre. There?s 157 feet of waterfront on Choctawhatchee Bay. Pilings from what once was a good-sized pier stick out of the water, the relic of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004.
When the Raims put the house on the market in August 2004, it was listed at $1.9 million. But with the Destin real estate market at the time red hot, with prices shooting up almost by day and some buyers snapping up homes before the for-sale signs even went up in the front yard, Raim fi gured the house and land would fetch more.
In March 2005, he upped it to $2.2 million. In the summer of 2005, to $2.49 million. In the summer of 2006, he asked $2.79 million. It?s listed on the tax rolls today at $1.5 million, he said.
Up to now, Raim said most of their would-be buyers were only ?tire kickers.?
Pat Fisher, an independent broker representing the Raims, said they had offers in 2004 and 2005, ?but they just didn?t work.?
So after nearly three years on the market, Raim said, he needed to do something to call attention to the property.
He?s hopeful his latest price change will be the dealmaker.
Last year, Raim said, a vacant bayfront lot just south of his home on Calhoun sold for $1.15 million, and it was half the size of his. And today, two vacant lots on Joe?s Bayou, less than a mile from his home, are listed at $950,000 each, he said.
The beauty of his lot, he said, is that it can be split into two nice-sized waterfront properties, each with about 75 feet on the bay.
?I?m selling for the land value, not for the house,? he said.
On a stroll to the water?s edge one recent evening, mullet jumped through the air, splashing in the shallow water. Men zipped by a little further out on personal watercraft. The western sky was turning color with the sunset as bigger boats made their way home out in Choctawhatchee Bay.
Raim says he couldn?t live anywhere else but on the water.
He figures he?ll stick with his $1.79 million price for two months ? and then if it does not move, he?ll change his strategy. Plan B may have him building two houses on the property, one for each of his two children, then build a house for him and his wife on a vacant lot he owns on a canal on Holiday Isle. Then there?s a house and land he owns less than a mile away on Calhoun, where he could build.
?Quality pieces of property are hard to come by,? he said. ?Everybody wants their lot to be valuable, but nobody wants to pay the taxes.?
Fisher said that at a meeting about commercial real estate a few weeks ago with three bank presidents, ?they wanted to let us know they are still lending money but that appraisals are on coming in lower than the contract price.?
She cited an example: ?I had a house listed on the bay, $1.75 million, an excellent house. I got a contract, waited two weeks for the appraisal, and it came in 30 percent low. It killed the deal. In my 10 years in real estate, I?ve never had that happen.
?It was frustrating for everybody ? the seller wanted to sell, the buyers wanted to buy and the mortgage company was ready to lend,? Fisher said.
Mary Anne Windes, a veteran broker in Destin who has Real Estate Professionals of Destin, said in an e-mail interview, ?The trend is that prices are moving to the same level that they were in 2003. As you will recall, 2004 and 2005 saw tremendous and often unrealistic growth. The market has now corrected itself. Many properties doubled in value during that time, so a drop of half the value is not unrealistic right now if a seller needs to sell.?
Raim remembers the 1970s, when he said you could buy waterfront property in Destin, Niceville and Cinco Bayou for a down payment of $100 and then $30 to $35 a month.
?The masses could afford it,? he said.
Today, that?s harder and harder, he said.
Raim traces his roots to the Destin area to his four years as an optometrist in the Air Force; he came to Destin in 1975 and became the community?s first optometrist when he opened his practice in 1977.