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Don and Karen Walton sit in their classic Georgian center-hall colonial, in the slowest-moving segment of a slow real estate market. Their million-dollar Goshen home, set amid expansive lawns and English-style gardens, drew three prospective buyers in 2011.
?In six months, three people,? Karen Walton said one morning in her kitchen. ?This year, so far, we?ve had seven.?
Don Walton, 70, a retired engineer, said: ?There was a flurry of interest in July, when we had four people. There?s been nothing in August.?
Any offers?
?No offers, no second looks,? Don Walton said. ?They said it was a beautiful house, but some said the price was too high when they shouldn?t have been looking in the first place. Some people do it for entertainment. They don?t have anything else to do, so they look at houses. Out of all the people who looked, I?d say three were qualified buyers.?
Few million-dollar homes sell
The lack of action isn?t unusual in the million-dollar home market.
In late July, there were 64 single-family homes for sale in Orange County priced at $1 million or more, according to the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service. During the first seven months of the year, only three such homes sold.
The malaise extends to houses priced at $500,000 or more.
In 2005, when credit was still easy to come by, and when so many erroneously thought prices would never fall, 408 homes sold in Orange County for $500,000 or more. Compare that with 2011, when there were only 67 such sales. If that pace continues, it would take roughly five years to exhaust the current supply of half-million-and-higher listings.
More than 20 such homes, most listed at $1 million or more, are for sale in Tuxedo Park. Even sellers in the exclusive gated community have felt the pinch of a tight market. One residence, listed at $1.25 million in May 2010, was reduced to $949,000 on July 1, according to the real estate website Zillow.com. Another home has dropped to $1.95 million from $2.25 million since it was first listed in December 2010.
?It?s a very weak segment of the market,? said Ann Garti, chief operating officer of the Goshen branch of the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors. She attributed the problem to cutbacks in the Manhattan financial industry that reduced the pool of buyers. Other factors include fewer ?move-up? buyers because of a paucity of buyers for their homes, persistent 8 to 9 percent unemployment in the region, and an increase in lender vigilance.
The most action is found in the $200,000-to-$349,999 price range. There were 428 sales in that range ? or nearly half of Orange County sales ? through July 31 of this year.
Sticking with the price
The Waltons asked $1.18 million when they listed their nearly 4,900-square-foot home for sale in May 2011. They took it off the market over the winter when they went to their home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. It returned to the market in March. Lowering the asking price to $1.10 million has not raised buyer interest.
?Someone who wants this house has to want quality,? Karen Walton said of the home she and her husband designed and built in 1999.
A real estate feature in The New York Times, ?If You?re Thinking of Living in Goshen,? included the Waltons? home, which has been advertised in The Wall Street Journal as well as online.
The Waltons are not ready to reduce the asking price again.
?If there?s no activity, no interest and no market, there?s no sense in going against yourself by dropping the price,? Don Walton said. ?And when the economy recovers, once you?ve dropped your price, you?re finished, end of discussion.?
Lowering the price has been a regular activity at several high-end homes for sale less than a mile from the Waltons. One 5,840-square-foot house, listed at $1.6 million in April 2008, was offered in late August at $949,000, according to Zillow.
Two doors away, a house measuring 5,978 square feet was reduced to $784,000 in July from $1.119 million in 2009. A third house on the same block ? 4,239 square feet on 2 acres ? was most recently listed at $799,999, down from $1.25 million in June 2010.
Those houses and others on the block were built in the early 2000s, as residents of Rockland, Westchester and New York City were moving to Orange County by the thousands, and the building boom was reaching a crescendo.
A decade later, it seems to Karen Walton that ?there isn?t a big market for this house in Orange County. If it was in Westchester, it could sell for $2 million, $2.5 million.?
Selling a Westchester-style home in Orange County, though, is a much tougher sale than it was a few years ago.
?We built this house for us, not with the idea of living here a few years and flipping it,? Don Walton said. ?I guess that was kind of a trap. But we have no regrets. We?ve had a good life here, and it?ll work out eventually. It might not work out economically like we?d want it to, but we?re in the same boat as everyone else.?
jwalsh@th-record.com
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