Orthopedic surgeon Regis O’Keefe and his wife, Carol, scoured the Adirondacks in search of a lakefront vacation home with lots of land. But the Rochester, N.Y., couple found nothing in their price range.
So they started looking off the beaten path in the nearby Canadian province of Ontario. And there they found it: a charming two-bedroom cabin on 34 acres overlooking a lake–all for less than $150,000.
“It’s unbelievable what you can get here,” says Mrs. O’Keefe. “There’s so much land and so few people.”
Forget the Malibu beach house, the Aspen condo and the Martha’s Vineyard bungalow. With prices in traditional second-home communities soaring through the roof, savvy house hunters are finding great deals in up-and-coming getaway spots from Belize to West Virginia.
While these places still lack the cachet of the Hamptons, they are scenic, untrammelled and, increasingly, even fashionable. Best of all, they are still relative bargains.
In the small Appalachian-foothill town of Berkeley Springs, W.Va., a three-bedroom vacation chalet sells for $90,000. In Pahrump, a sunny outpost about an hour’s drive west of Las Vegas, $198,000 buys a three-bedroom house with a game room on an acre-plus. There aren’t even any listings at that price in Aspen.
Price isn’t the only attraction. As suburbia continues to spread and air connections improve, some of these addresses are becoming more accessible. Berkeley Springs used to be considered too long a drive for Washington day-trippers, but it’s only about an hour and a half from some of the capital’s new bedroom communities.
Mrs. O’Keefe says it actually takes less time to get from Rochester to her place in Ontario than to many parts of the Adirondacks. Air travel abroad is also getting faster and cheaper from many U.S. cities.
“With weekend traffic, it takes six or more hours to get to Lake Tahoe,” says Charles Coustan, a senior director at a new-media company in San Francisco who is currently shopping for a second home in Phuket, Thailand. “In that time, you can almost get to Thailand.”
Overseas buyers have the added advantage of a dollar that remains strong compared with most currencies, low interest rates, a softening of international trade barriers and better access to listings, especially on the Internet.
U.S. house hunters who have been priced out of Tuscany, for example, are now going to Portugal’s Algarve region, while intrepid types who might have thought about Hawaii or the South Pacific are checking out places like Nelson, New Zealand. There, on the coast of the country’s sparsely populated South Island, a four bedroom, mountain-view house with a deck can be had for $178,000.
“Three or four years ago, there just wasn’t this sort of interest,” says David Michonski, chairman of the international wing of the National Association of Realtors. “Back then, the only way you could find out about properties in many countries was to look at a bulletin board in a local bar.”
Of course, there are reasons why some of these new bargain hot spots are so cheap. While a jungle-view hacienda in Belize, in Central America, may confer major bragging rights, the usual hassles of buying a home are compounded by the distance.
Many countries have no laws to protect consumers should the deal go sour, few have multiple-listing services, and financing can be almost nonexistent for foreign buyers. Rules restricting foreign ownership are common (in Thailand and some parts of Mexico, foreigners aren’t allowed to own the land their home sits on), and the mechanisms for recording titles may be lax.
Even in the U.S., buying in backwater towns has its drawbacks. The cultural high point in Berkeley Springs, for example, is the annual Apple Butter Festival, and the closest major airport to Pahrump is an hour away.
Still, at times like these, home prices at or below $200,000–and in many cases, below $100,000–exert a powerful pull.
Just ask Fred and Susan Wittmer of Doylestown, Pa., who bought a new three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath vacation home in the small village of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Mexico, with an eye to retiring there in a few years.
The deal was a tangle of red tape, and the $200,000 stucco-and-red tile house immediately sprang gas, water and roof leaks. But now everything’s fixed, and the Wittmers are thrilled.
“My friends back in Doylestown laughed at me when we told them we were buying in Mexico,” Wittmer says. “But I notice they’re all lining up now to visit.”
Berkeley Springs is a mid-19th Century watering hole about a two hours’ drive from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, is undergoing a revival as vacationers and retirees snap up its cheap ski-slope chalets and gentleman’s farms.
Among them are retirees Ken and Joyce Frazier, who bought a four-bedroom brick ranch house on more than 19 wooded acres for only $170,000.
“I just had to get away from the hustle and bustle,” says Frazier, who moved to Berkeley Springs from Savage, Md. in July. “And after looking up and down the East Coast, we couldn’t find any better views–or prices.”
Berkeley Springs real estate broker Jim Miller says that three-bedroom vacation chalets start at about $90,000, and that for $150,000 to $200,000 you can get a 2,000-square-foot home that’s “really decked out” with features such as saunas and whirlpools, plenty of acreage and river views.
He adds that the area recently has been “discovered” by vacationers and retirees, and that sales in his office have increased about 30 percent in the past three years.
Property taxes on a 2000-square-foot home run about $900 a year; sales tax is 6 percent, and there’s a sliding-scale state income tax with a maximum rate of 6 percent.
There’s not much high culture in Berkeley Springs–the highlight of the year is the annual Apple Butter Festival–but there’s still plenty to do if your tastes run to hunting, hiking, fishing, horse-back riding, skiing and water-sports.
Some vacation home seekers have found Pasco County, on Florida’s West Central coast, which was considered a backwater a generation ago. But now citrus groves, cow pastures and mobile home parks are giving way to the sort of sophisticated fare found in Sarasota and Naples.
“This is like what Key West was 15 years ago,” says Roxanne Bracewell, a real estate agent in Hudson, one of the hottest areas in the county.
“People are ripping out $80,000 homes and building mansions.”
Although her agency’s sales have doubled since last year, Bracewell says that there are still a number of good buys in the $150,000 to $200,000 range, many fronting the Gulf of Mexico.
She adds that because the area is still largely rural, wildlife–including bald eagles, ospreys and flamingoes–can sometimes be seen from your backyard deck.
