Coronavirus Real Estate Market Update at Lake Oconee Part Two

We hope this update finds you and your family in good health and also being able to weather the turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kim and Lin Logan Real Estate is still continuing to operate as we discussed in the last update. We are following the guidance from our government and continuing to implement procedures in accordance with their directives.

As a reminder, these include social distancing, working from home as much as possible, extra screening of clients before showing property, enhanced social distancing showing procedures, practicing good hygiene and driving in separate vehicles if showing clients. Our entire staff and agents are available to continue servicing both sellers and buyers and providing our normal high level of service.

We are amazed each day as we watch the health care workers across the country get up and go to work, knowing they are putting themselves at high risk and sacrificing so much to help other people.

Our business has been classified as a critical industry and we also take our role seriously. We will continue to do our small part to both serve our clients as well as protect the most vulnerable people in our country.

We all want to protect ourselves and live as long a life as possible, but many of us also have children and grandchildren that we hope to leave in this world long after we are gone. As such, we would very much like to leave them with a great country and economy to thrive in like we have had.

It remains too early to forecast/predict what the impact of our current situation will be on our market. Since our previous update, nationwide measures to stem the spread of the virus were put forth until April 30th by President Donald Trump. As stated in our previous update, we believe the longer it takes for businesses to get back to a more normal environment, the more negative of on impact on our market.

We can report that we lost about half of the contracts we were working in the midst of this pandemic. We are still working with active buyers and still getting good interest from our marketing (both internet and print media). Actual showings have gone way down as you would expect (approximately 90%), but we are implementing a lot of virtual techniques to include live/still videos and video conferencing with clients to mitigate this. Our agents are also putting additional emphasis on social media such as Facebook and Instagram We have put several properties under contract since the pandemic started and it is obvious to us that the active buyers we are working with are serious buyers with a high chance of purchasing real estate.

Here is a quick 2020 first-quarter market compared with last year: 

Jan-Mar 2019:

• PROPERTIES SOLD 302
  
  
• AVERAGE SOLD PRICE $322,000
  
  
• LAKE HOMES SOLD 30
  
  
• LAKE LOTS SOLD 16
  
  
• GOLF COMMUNITY HOMES SOLD 36
  
  
• GOLF COMMUNITY LOTS SOLD 17