lexington realtor

The LEXpert tours Timber Creek

by John Rice

It was a beautiful day yesterday.  Had to put the top down and talk about one of my favorite neighborhoods in all of Lexington in the $120-160k range……Timber Creek.

If you want to be near Hamburg in this price range, your choices are pretty much the neighborhoods off of Liberty Road or Timber Creek.  I’ve always recommended Timber Creek.  It just has a lot of things going for it.  It’s got a park close by, a walking trail, banks, restaurants, gas stations, a veterinarian and other businesses, it is just across Man O War from Hamburg, and it is in an area with much higher priced houses.

I tend to think of Timber Creek as two neighborhoods really.  The earlier section has bigger lots.  It feels a lot like Eastwood, which is another neighborhood I like.  The newer section has smaller lots and more of a Masterson Station vibe.  My favorite section is the older one just because it has more space, but the location is so good that I can recommend both.

Here is a video I did of the park that is within walking distance from Timber Creek:

“Local agents won’t show your house if listed with a Lexington agent” T or F?

by John Rice

Maita yardsign

I was heading to Mt. Sterling today to stick a sign in the yard of a new listing.  I took Route 60 all the way from my neighborhood in Lexington.  It was a beautiful day to put the top down, so I did.

As I am driving down there, I was thinking about how some sellers believe agents when they say stuff like this:  “If you list with a Lexington agent, none of the (insert small town surrounding Lexington here) agents will show your house.”  I guess in the old days when agents were the gate keepers of info, that might have been true for a very small percentage of selfish realtors.   Today, buyers are seeing the houses online and they tell their agents which ones they want to see.

Even now when I list houses outside of Lexington, many sellers ask me if that is true.  All I know is that I have never met an agent that would let where the listing agent was from stand between them and selling a house.  A few years ago, I even did a some research on a little town just outside of Lexington.  I wanted to see how many houses were listed by Lexington agents verses local agents, then compare the average days on market between the two.  Well, the Lexington agents actually sold their listings faster than the local ones.

So if you live outside of Lexington and would like your yard sign delivered in a 1990 Miata, have no fear.  Local agents will show your house because that is their job and their buyers will see it on every real estate website that exists.

Guess these 2 neighborhoods that are so much alike?

by John Rice

This neighborhood use to be on the edge of Lexington.  It was a rural setting with high end houses on acre lots.  There is a section of land that later became available.  Those houses are still on larger than normal lots, but less than an acre.  It is close to upscale dining and shopping.  It has other equally desirable neighborhoods around it.  When you are in this neighborhood, you still can feel a little bit of how it use to be in the country.

Know what two neighborhoods I am talking about?  I bet some long term Lexingtonians who know 40502 will say Lakewood.  Everybody else may think Greenbrier.  Both are right.

Back in the 50s when Lakewood was being developed, it was on the edge of town.  There were no curbs on the streets.  The lots were big.  It was a rural setting.  Things like New Circle Road and The Lansdowne Shoppes did not exist.  There was no Alumni Drive.  Just a country road called Mount Tabor.  It eventually became surrounded by other nice neighborhoods.  Then in the mid 80s to mid 90s various bits of a large chunk of land became available and were developed.

In the 70s and 80s, Greenbrier was in the country too.  There was no Man O War nor Hamburg.  You took Winchester Road or Bryant Road to get there.  Greenbrier is now surrounded on 3 sides by neighborhoods like Walnut Grove Estates, Bryant Oak Place, Ashford Oaks and The Reserve at Greenbrier (which has absolutely nothing to do with Greenbrier….guess you can’t trademark neighborhood names?)

Greenbrier is in for some changing.  It has already begun.  It really isn’t a rural neighborhood any more.  It is turning into the classic upscale 40509 neighborhood much like Lakewood, or Ashland Park are to 40502.  What makes both unique are not only the larger lots, but the feel of the neighborhood that just can’t be matched elsewhere.  Those newer streets in Lakewood were full of much nicer houses than the others when they were new.  Right now, the Jimmy Nash houses are much nicer than anything in Greenbrier proper.  But what can’t be duplicated is the mature landscaping and the peaceful easy feeling you get in the older parts of Lakewood and Greenbrier……those features were part of developing the neighborhood.  Developers just don’t do that any more.

So, I think we will see more buyers viewing Greenbrier as a unique neighborhood surrounded by other upscale neighborhoods in a convenient location.  When I moved here in 1985, Greenbrier was way out of town.  It is hard to believe there is a Costco less than 5 minutes away now.  Lakewood 2.0, here we come!

Was it me or St. Joseph?

by John Rice

Benz on snow

Back when the market was terrible and buyers had a ton of choices in any price range, I said that you had to have the online presentation perfect because buyers would not take the time to come see the house if you didn’t.  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I also thought that if we ever had a hot seller’s market again that buyers would come see any house that was in an area they liked, regardless of the presentation.  I was wrong.

Here we are in such a market.  Good houses are selling very fast.  Overpriced houses and ones poorly presented are collecting dust.  It is like buyers are not willing to go backwards in their searches.  Like they see a new listing and either go see it or totally forget it forever.  I think some of this is because buyers are setting up saved searches on sites like Zillow or realtor.com.  They are only really looking at the new listings.  In the old days, you know, around 2011, people would scroll through all the listings everyday just to see the new listings.  You really need a price reduction or status change to get back in their portals.

Here is an example:  I’ve got a listing that we put on the market during all the snow we had this past winter.  The seller wanted me to wait to update the pictures until a certain tree was in bloom.  We hardly had any showing since the outside picture had snow on the ground.  This house has an amazing backyard.  Mentioning it in the marketing remarks did not matter much without a picture to show it.  The picture above was taken the day my photographer did the shoot.  There was nowhere to park so I made my own space.  Once the snow melted, we had maybe 3 showings in 45 days.

Finally, the seller agreed that it was time to update the picture.  The tree had pushed out it’s blooms.  I got my photographer back out.  I deleted the listing and put it back on as a new listing with the new pictures.  That was less than 48 hours ago and I have confirmed 4 showings since then.

The seller, a good friend of mine, credits the statue of Saint Joseph she buried.  I get no respect ;-(

What happens when Lexington runs out of space?

by John Rice

Want to know what I am thinking about?  Land.  That’s right, how much of it we have left in Fayette County and what it means when we run out.

Lexington has an Urban Service area, which is the land available for development…..it’s like our version of what other towns call their “City Limits.”

Short of expanding it, we will run out soon.  Now, I am sure the city will reluctantly expand it a little, but we don’t really have much space left.  Period.  We are already to Jessamine County on the south.  We have giant horse farms to the east and west.  These are farms owned by people who don’t need money.  Even if they decided to sell, it just would not be profitable to develop.  Plus, many farms sold off their property development rights, aka PDR, to the city.  That means they will always be farms.  Anything outside the urban service area cannot be subdivided into anything less than 40 acres.

About all we have left is out towards Georgetown and Winchester Road.  After that it is infill.  After than we will probably see more construction in adjoining towns, giving Lexington “Real” suburbs.

So what will happen at that point?  Prices in Lexington will go up.  Neighborhoods/locations that have been less than desirable will become more desirable.  We’ll see many older neighborhoods renewed since people will be happy to live somewhere in Fayette County.  We’ll see more additions and remodeling too.

Lexington will continue to grow, like it or not.  It is just too pretty of a town to not.  It has enough large employers that it will always be the commercial center of this half of the state.  Many people go to college here and never leave.  Truth.

Think of it in these terms…..the 40502 zip code has always been the most desirable part of Lexington.  There really are no bad areas of 40502.  Kenwick was the armpit of 40502 until about the mid 90’s.  That neighborhood still has a long way to go in the very back, but it is getting there quickly.   People want to live there for its location.  Same thing will happen all over Lexington eventually.  Many neighborhoods that people are not interested in today will go up a notch or two in desirability as living anywhere in Lexington becomes more desirable than commuting from a surrounding town.  As prices in 1st choice neighborhoods go up due to demand, that will push buyers to their 2nd choice neighborhoods.  Rinse.  Wash.  Repeat.  The values of the 2nd choice neighborhoods will go up, pushing buyers down another ring.  At that point many will have to pick between living in Lexington or being in Nicholasville, Winchester or Georgetown.  Those are the surrounding towns that I think will grow the most as we run out of space.