Big Bear Lakefront Properties – Up & Down The Past 12 Months

With all the talk of how bad the real estate market is these days, I am starting to track the statistics of the Big Bear real estate market. The sales for lakefront properties, and all other properties in Big Bear Lake for that matter, tend to tail off during the winter months as most people turn their attention towards the local ski slopes, the holidays, and tax time. Let’s take a look at where the 2007 sales stats for the lakefront properties in Big Bear stand as of yesterday (Dec. 4, 2007).

I compared the lakefront sales for the past 12 months on a rolling basis (Dec. 5, 2006 to Dec. 4, 2007) with that of the previous 5 years based on the same time frames. The sales numbers are pretty interesting. You will see that the sales price for lakefront homes in the Big Bear Lake area went up an average of 15.95% the past 4 years while the number of sales is at a 4 year low. 2005 was the biggest jump in prices, close to 34%, which I believe was in direct relation to the lake level rising nearly 18 feet during that Spring. This lends to the credibility that the higher the lakefront level, the higher the value is going to be.

The average price for lakefront properties has steadily climbed over the past few years, even in a real estate market where most of the homes in the Big Bear area have seen negative appreciation the past 1-2 years. The median price jumped nearly $400,000 for lakefront properties in the last 12 months. With only 20-40 sales per year, I realize this might be a small sample to analyze but the fact still remains that the prices of lakefront properties are still rising.

The number of sales is down compared to the previous 12-24 months (ranging form 25-50%). I think this shows that just because the prices are up, the buyers are still few and they are being selective as to which lakefront properties are worthy of the asking price.

Further illustrating this point, the average days on the market for lakefront properties has been climbing the past 24 months as well. It took close to 150 days on the market to sell the past 12 months as compared to 100 days two years ago.

While the rest of the market is not doing so well, lakefront property owners in Big Bear are still seeing a good return over the past 5 years. I will continue to monitor these sales numbers and report back my findings. If there are other sales numbers in the Big Bear area that you would like to see the sales stats on, please feel free to comment and let me know.