Can you buy a house on St. John for less? The answer, of course, is yes. The question is how much less? The answer is an average of 8% or 9%.
About four out of five home sales in 2006 and 2007 were made at less than the listing price, according to historical sales information available on the Cruz Bay Realty Web site. About 13% of home sales closed at the asking price, and about 4% were done for more than that.
Now, the "Asking Price" may not be the property’s original listing because some buyers do reduce their prices during the marketing process. Some houses also sell for a lot less than asking, such as a 4-bedroom Chocolate Hole home which closed at $1.95 million, 22% below the starting point. Same thing happened in 2006, when a 9-bedroom home in Enighed sold for just about $1 million, down from asking $1.5 million (Must have needed a LOT of work!).
You can do the math yourself. Gretchen Labrenz’s firm, CBR, has data online going back nine years. House, land, and condo transactions are viewable at http://cruzbayrealty.com/sales_history.html.
One takeaway … the average selling price for a home on St. John in 1999 was $447,000. This year, it’s $1.7 million. Put another way, the average island home price has increased 300% in eight years. The Dow Jones Industrial average has increased 25%.