Ozarks Living is as good as it gets.

Prices on homes along the lakes in the Branson area have been creeping down slowly along with the rest of the houses around here.  While looking at a waterfront home's comparable properties to prepare for a potential listing I was amazed at the price declines over the past year.  It is hard to generalize and even harder to put a specific percentage on the changes, so Iwill just say they are down more, in some cases, than homes that are not waterfront houses. 

Several factors could easily be causes of this phenomena that completely captured my attention.  One could be the amount of flooding that occurred this year, have heard it described by another Realtor as two hundred year floods, this could make the desire to purchase lakefront homes lessen for sure. 

 Another factor could be the economic uncertainty that prevents people from buying vacation or weekend retreats.  Demand dropped more for those types of second homes than a normal primary residence in my opinion quite a bit more during the past year as well. 

What does this mean to the potential home buyer looking to take advantage of these diminished prices on lakefront or riverfront property?  It means that even though most people would not agree with you deciding to buy in such uncertain times, I would like to suggest you could easily find the lakefront property of a lifetime, if you are in a safe position to buy right now.  Naturally, I would recommend you contact me to help you with that, lol, who else?

Looking for Land in the Ozarks

Whenever people tell me they are looking for land I get involved with a passion.  I love to show land more than any other type of real estate.  There is land you can farm, land for grazing, timber land, residential lots, ranchland, upland, bottomland, wasteland, land with live water, waterfront land, waterview land etc. 

The more questions I have asked, the better picture of what type of land is being sought.  Even though that helps tremendously, you still need to see a lot of land before you can really get a picture of their need. 

Showing houses is a lot like showing land but there are only some many available that will fit the kind of criteria most search questions help narrow your choices down to.  True, there may be several that are close but I find I can get closer to knowing what to show people sooner when dealing with house hunting than looking for land.  Yes, I do enjoy helping people find the home they really are looking for and find it very rewarding and fulfilling when they say they have fallen in love with this house.  Mission accomplished and usually in less time that I would expect after showing several that did not seem close. 

But it just never goes that way with land hunting and the hunt is what I enjoy, which is probably why I love searching for the parcel my clients have pictured in their mind the most, because it really is the most challenging.  We will look for two or three times longer for a piece of ground that is just what my clients want than for a house they have pictured in their minds.  Every land search takes that much longer and is that much more challenging in my opinion.  Knowing the challenge it presents and the hunt involved must get the "old hunter" going in me and makes my ears perk up every time I hear, "We are looking for some land"  Yahoo, here we go again, around the Missouri Ozarks on my rounds.

Ozarks cattle are happy but what about the deer?

I snapped a quick photo of some hay spread out on the field by a local farmer and thought, what about the deer.  Then I remembered, they are primarily nocturnal feeders and will probably be out here tonight cleaning up after the cattle have gone to sleep.  I kow cattle sleep at night because one of the local fun things to do in the Ozarks is to go cow tipping.  Just grab a flashlight and a couple of bubbas and you are in for a night of hysterical fun, that does nothing to please your neighborhood cattlemen.  Well, we've enjoyed the snow for a few days and are ready for it to go away so we can get ready for the big bass to start moving up into the shallow water again, so come on sunshine, come on spring, come on warmer days and nights.  Waiting for fishing season is almost as tough as it was to wait on Santa way back when.