Developers built and sold exceptionally pricey residences at Hawaii resorts last year, according to a new report that shows the state’s vacation-home market appears to be offsetting softer demand by selling higher-priced properties.
The report by local housing market researcher Ricky Cassiday said sales of condominiums, single-family homes and undeveloped house lots at resorts statewide slipped 3 percent last year to 1,315 from 1,360 the year before.
Yet the average sale price last year rose
5 percent to $1.31 million from $1.25 million.
Combining price and volume produced a
2 percent gain in total market revenue, which reached an eight-year high of $1.73 billion.
“We are seeing the market trend go in different directions — down for sales and up with prices,” the report said.
The report covers sales of new and previously owned residential property at master-planned vacation resorts such as Wailea on Maui, Princeville on Kauai, Mauna Lani on Hawaii island and Ko Olina on Oahu.
Cassiday said Hawaii’s resort housing market has been volatile for the past several years after sales peaked in 2005 and prices peaked in 2008. The peak for total market revenue was $2.6 billion in 2007, or about $900 million more than last year.
The biggest segment of Hawaii’s vacation-home market involves previously owned property resold by owners. This part of the market had fewer sales and flat prices last year. There were just under 1,100 resales last year for about
$1.1 million on average, compared with a little over 1,100 resales at the same average price the year before.
The report showed a surge among resales last year of homes priced over
$3 million; 136 were sold, up 20 percent from 113 sales the year before.
Within this lofty part of the market was one sale for $41.8 million — the priciest of the year. The property was a 4-year-old custom luxury estate in Wailea with a 6,737-square-foot main house and 1,004-square-foot secondary dwelling on 4 acres.
Offsetting the jump at the top end of the resale market was a major decline in sales of homes priced between
$1 million and $1.25 million, where volume sank 26 percent to 97 sales last year from 131 a year earlier.
Developers, meanwhile, pushed up prices and built relatively little new product last year.
“This is what developers do,” Cassiday said. “They push the price.”
The report showed that developers sold relatively few new resort homes last year — just under 250 — representing a fifth consecutive year of roughly similar volume. By comparison, sales by developers ranged roughly between 375 and 1,000 annually from 1990 to 2010.
Instead, developers focused on higher-end properties that sold for a record average $2.3 million last year. The prior record was about $2 million in 2014.
Last year Maui was the hot spot for top prices. The average price developers received for residential property sold at Maui resorts last year was
$5.2 million for single-family homes, $3.8 million for vacant lots and $2.5 million for condos, Cassiday’s report said.
On Hawaii island, average sale prices for new resort home properties were $4.8 million for single-family homes, $2.8 million for lots and $1.8 million for condos.
Kauai sale prices were $2.4 million for single-family homes, $1 million for lots and $445,648 for condos.
The average new resort condo sale price on Oahu was $514,633; no new homes or lots were sold, the report said.
Wayne Muraoka, vice president of Honolulu-based Armstrong Development, which has several resort housing projects on the neighbor islands, said developers would be building more if they had more confidence that buyer demand would absorb more product.
“The risk is tremendous,” he said. “There is such heavy investment before you even sell the first home.”
Muraoka said some of the soft demand stems from Canada where a significant number of buyers come from to buy Hawaii winter vacation homes. The value of the Canadian dollar fell significantly last year, making Hawaii property more expensive.
Cassiday’s report said a handful of new residential development projects at resorts are underway, though the number of new property sales is expected to continue shrinking until construction is finished and sales can be completed this year and next year.