Skaneateles Lake Homes

A convergence of events has occurred - the temperature got warmer, the Village got busier, and I just spent a goodly portion of the weekend updating my listings on the multiple listing service as well as http://realtor.com/ and http://lakehouse.com/. I also showed waterfront this past week and will do so again this upcoming week. Summer is right around the corner! So it seems appropriate that I write about the lakes and the marvelous opportunities that exist to own waterfront. Lake by lake, starting with Skaneateles.

Today I'll focus only on single family homes, or "camps" as we call them here or lakehouses as the vast majority should be named. I used to own a "camp," but since we renovated it seems more like a lakehouse, even though it retains the small feeling and ease of care.

There are currently 38 properties identified by the multiple listing service as being on Skaneateles Lake. They are contained in three counties - Onondaga, Cayuga and Cortland. Prices range from the low of $159,000 to a high of 3.5M. The median price is $889,000. By way of a disclaimer, I have a property listed twice - once with 78 feet of waterfront and again, at a higher price ($950,000), with 153 feet of waterfront. I am certain there must be properties that are not lakefront, but only lake rights. Somehow that distinction dropped off our reporting criteria a few years ago, leaving us all with the dilemma of how to tell people that yes, you can gain access, but no, it's not right on the water. Hopefully that will be corrected at some point, but for now, I haven't gone through to check. Bottom line - consider the number "38" as an approximation.

Of these properties, 12 are listed over 1M, with another 5 barely under that figure. Six of the homes (actually, one is a lot without a house) have 0 to 1 bedroom. At the other end, 4 houses have 5 bedrooms.

Now the fun part! Taxes run from $4,493 per year (total) to the high of $56,900, appropriately attached to the highest listed home. Square footage starts at 404 feet and runs to 4,400sf (NOT the highest priced home, I might add). Assessments are as low as $105,000 (which I wonder about) or the next is $153,800 and the high is 2.2M which produced the 56K in taxes. List prices do not reflect the assessments - of the three I chose as random, one was $100,000 below, another about the same, and a third $400,000 higher!

Of these 38, four of the homes are in the Village, four are in Spafford down the east side of the lake, 2 in Niles on the west side (but that's suspect because we list them as being in Skaneateles for the exposure) and the remaining 28 are identified as Skaneateles. Eleven companies represent these properties, and at least two boards: The Greater Syracuse Association of Realtors and the Cortland Board.

When I requested how many Skaneateles Lake properties had sold, I got the number 135. Of these, 25 closed in the past 12 months. At this rate we then have about 18 months of inventory. The median list price was $500,000; 5 were over 1M.

So as I go off this week to show lakefront, I can bear in mind these figures. And now, so can you.