As home sales dropped in central Ohio last year, one exclusive corner of the market enjoyed a
slight turnaround: 47 houses sold for more than $1million.
That’s still a tiny fraction of the market – about 0.2 percent of all homes sold – but last year
was the first year since 2005 to show any gain in that rarefied niche.
“We’ve got a collection of million-dollar properties in central Ohio that are starting to
move again,” said Doug Green, a Prudential Metrix Realtors agent who helps coordinate the Central
Ohio Luxury Home Network, a group of two dozen real-estate agents who specialize in high-end
properties.
Six central Ohio homes sold for more than $2 million and six more fetched at least $1.5
million last year. Those dozen top sellers range from a 4,000-square-foot Gahanna-area ranch on 15
acres to an 18,000-square-foot New Albany mansion that was on the market for almost six years.
In that price range, homes start with media rooms, three-car garages, multiple fireplaces and
massive gourmet kitchens.
They grow from there. The average size of the dozen top sellers is more than 8,000 square feet.
Most of the homes have four or five bedrooms, but four have six bedrooms and one has eight. Three
of the properties include guesthouses.
All those overnight guests need a place for their cars; two of the homes have six-car
garages.
Among other features in the homes: water frontage (two homes are on Hoover Reservoir and several
boast ponds); wine cellars; and at least one billiards room.
The homes also come with tax bills starting at about $10,000 a year and marching steadily upward
to $126,461 a year for the New Albany mansion.
Even though million-dollar sales inched up, such homes are hardly flying off the shelves (or the
shore). About 125 central Ohio homes are still for sale north of $1 million, and, as agents point
out, many of the $800,000 or $900,000 homes now on the market would have been listed for seven
figures a few years ago, before the audience for such homes shrank.
Still, that two-year-plus supply of million-dollar homes is better than it was.
“A few years ago in that price range, there was a four- or five-year supply,” said Gary Wolf, a
Coldwell Banker King Thompson agent who sold a couple of million-dollar homes last year.
It remains a buyer’s market in that price range, and most of the million-dollar homes that sold
fetched far less than their original listing price.
The most dramatic sale of the year was the New Albany mansion with eight bedrooms, eight full
baths and four half-baths, eight fireplaces and a six-car garage. The home sold for $5.2 million –
easily a central Ohio record. But the house sold only after it had sat on the market almost six
years and owners knocked $3.7 million (about 42 percent) off the original asking price.
The other 11 homes that sold for at least $1.5 million took an average of 192 days to sell –
more than twice as long as typical central Ohio properties. They sold, on average, 20.2 percent
below their original listing price – four times the price concessions offered on typical central
Ohio homes last year.
Those price reductions were one reason buyers started showing up, agents say
“Sellers have gotten more realistic about their prices, and you’ve also had some distressed
situations, even in the luxury market,” said Virgil Mathias, a Coldwell Banker King Thompson agent
who has long specialized in high-end properties.
Sharon Cook, a Coldwell Banker King Thompson agent who sold an Upper Arlington home for more
than $2 million last year, said some of her high-end clients who have held off on buying are now
starting to think prices won’t get much lower.
“If they’d been ready to buy in the last few years, they are recognizing that there will be a
point when prices start to go up again and there’ll be competition,” Cook said.
Another reason for the uptick: more hiring at central Ohio’s highest corporate levels and
hospitals, which provide the two main sources for high-priced buyers. Another, less predictable
source: professional athletes. (Two of last year’s top 10 sales went to former pro basketball
player Wally Szczerbiak and golfer Jason Day.)
“Some of our corporate relocation market is starting to come back a little bit,” said Jane
Kessler Lennox, with New Albany Realty, who was involved in four of last year’s top eight sales,
either as a listing or buyer’s agent. “But it’s more of a mix than it used to be. It used to be
that a lot of the high-end was strictly relocation. But the hospitals are all hiring, that’s
strong, and some of my buyers are local.”
Million-dollar homes on the market also benefited from a lack of speculative home-building
competing for the same buyers.
“They’re not putting up spec houses as much as they have in the past,” Green said. “If you look
at New Albany, Corazon (Dublin), Tartan West (Dublin), there’s not a lot of building there in the
very high end.”
Also helping: greater availability and better pricing on so-called jumbo loans, those more than
$417,000. Such loans became very expensive when the housing market started to crash but have
dropped closer to conventional loans during the past year.
The number of million-dollar sales remains far down from the market peak of 2005, when 93 homes
sold in that price range. But, surprisingly, last year’s top sellers commanded a higher price per
square foot compared with 2005’s sellers ($268 to $256), said Angela Murphy, an agent with Revealty
real-estate company.
An uptick in million-dollar sales doesn’t mean all expensive homes are selling. Sales remain
especially weak in the $500,000 range, agents say. Those buyers, unlike buyers in higher reaches,
are more vulnerable to job loss, interest-rate fluctuations and the need to get a solid price for a
current home.
“That $450,000 to $700,000 area is where you see that softness,” said Rick Benjamin, president
of the Columbus Board of Realtors. “People who have big money still have money.”
jweiker@dispatch.com