Nearly $2.3B in Hawaii resort home property sold last year

Vacationers, part-time residents and people wanting to live the resort lifestyle bought more residential real estate at Hawaii resorts last year, according to a new report.

It was the third straight year of increases in the number of single-family homes, condominiums and house lots sold within master­-planned resort communities. The average price, however, stayed flat for a fourth consecutive year at $1.3 million.

Ricky Cassiday, a local housing market researcher who produced the report, said factors supporting more sales include record tourists coming to the state, expanding personal incomes, uncertainty in the stock market and federal tax breaks for the wealthy.

“It’s a reflection of the economy doing well,” he said.

In all, $2.28 billion of residential property sold at resorts statewide last year.

The report showed that developers played a more significant part in satisfying buyer demand and drove nearly all of last year’s sales gain.

Developers sold 290 new properties last year, a 60% surge over the 181 sales in the prior year. Last year’s sale count for developers was the highest since 2010, when there were 370 sales.

Although improving, the numbers are nowhere near the level of sales that took place during the national housing bubble that preceded the crash of 2008. By comparison, there were 1,038 new residential real estate sales by developers at Hawaii resorts in 2006.

Cassiday said it’s not unusual for developer sales to rebound slowly because of risk calculations and the time involved to buy land, design projects, obtain financing and get them built.

“It’s a normal developer response,” he said.

Local development firm Alexander &Baldwin Inc. noted recently that sales at its master-planned Kauai resort housing community Kukui‘ula last year reached a post-recession high with 28 sales, which included house lots that sold for $525,000 to $4.8 million and homes for $1.3 million to $4.5 million.

The bulk of residential property sold at resorts are resales. Last year, there were 1,398 resales, up 1% from 1,381 a year earlier.

Of all the new and previously owned residential properties sold at Hawaii resorts last year, most were condos. Condo sale volume rose 8% to 1,147 last year from 1,067 the year before. Resort condos sold for an average $1.1 million last year, up from $1 million the year before.

There were 380 single-­family resort homes sold last year, up 11% from 343 a year earlier. The average price was $2.2 million, down from $2.4 million in the same comparable period.

A total of 161 house lots were sold at resorts last year, up 6% from 152 a year earlier. Lots sold for an average $1.2 million last year, up from $926,164 a year earlier.

By island, vacation property sales were up on Maui and Kauai but down on Oahu and Hawaii island.

There were 564 sales on Maui, up 26% from 447 sales a year earlier. The greatest number of Maui sales happened at Wailea where there were 192 sales, followed by 187 at Kaanapali.

On Kauai, sales rose 8% to 541 last year from 503 the year before. Standout sales occurred at Princeville with 228 sales and Poipu with 219 sales.

Sales on Oahu fell 15% to 126 last year from 149 a year earlier. Oahu sales don’t include Waikiki because it’s not a master-planned resort.

Hawaii island sales slipped 1% to 457 last year from 463 a year earlier. Most of the sales were at Mauna Lani and Keauhou, each with 113 sales.

The resort with the highest average price for any one product type was Kukio on Hawaii island, where 16 single-family homes were sold for $8.2 million on average.

The highest price for a single property last year was $35.7 million for a 10,469-square-foot mansion built in 2005 on 9 acres of Kauai oceanfront land in Kilauea by former Morgan Stanley executive Bill Strong. That was more than the top sale price of roughly $20 million in each of the last two years but less than a $41.8 million sale in 2015.