By Janet Fetterman, broker associate

CAM, CLHMS, CDPE, ABR, SRES, e-Pro

Director of Real Estate, Golden Ocala Golf & Equestrian Club

April has been a busy month for real estate at Golden Ocala Golf & Equestrian Club. Here are some numbers:

• We had a couple hundred people walk through the Parade of Homes to look at our models. Those people who came were given a goodie bag with literature about Golden Ocala membership and amenities. Included in the bags were information about our current models and our Member’s Resale Homes.
• In each model for the Parade of Homes, we blew up photos to 2-feet by 3-feet of our resale homes. Part of our pitch to visitors was to let them know of resale home availability.
• Co-broke agents with listings inside the gates also benefited from our Parade of Homes participation as they held resale open houses on Sundays to the visitors. All in all, we were quite pleased with the traffic.
• In addition to the Parade of Homes, we had 103 visitors walk through our doors in search of real estate during the first quarter. These were people coming from either Play and Stay Vacations or folks on the way to their Florida destination who stopped to see the community that they saw on TV during the LPGA.
• During the LPGA, we had 335 people who signed up for more information about our community, membership, Play and Stay options and real estate. We are busy working those contacts to convert them to prospective members and residents.
• This first quarter I earned my designation from the Luxury Marketing Institute. Officially, I now have the CLHMS, which stands for Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist. As part of this group, I am networking with agents around the world who specialize in luxury properties such as those at Golden Ocala Golf & Equestrian Club. Through this network, I have uploaded our resale listings on to worldproperties.com, which serves as an international MLS to the world. This site is very useful in that it will translate your listing into other languages. I have been busy also connecting with other golf and equestrian specialty agents to make the connections. At this writing, our resale listings are on this site and I’ll be adding developer homes next.
• All of our listings and models have been advertised in the Vue, which is Royal Shell Real Estate’s very own real estate newspaper. This is a four-color newspaper that is published quarterly. It is distributed in South Florida where our offices of 225 luxury agents are located as well as at the Publix store in that region, in Ocala’s Publix and up into Cashiers, North Carolina where our Landmark offices operate. The circulation of this publication is 300,000 quarterly.
• In the luxury market as defined by the more than $500,000 properties in the Ocala/Marion County Association of Realtors® MLS, for the first quarter of 2016, we saw a slowdown from last year’s first quarter. This year in the total MLS (luxury market) out of 433 active listings, there were 24 sales. This represented 6 percent sales of the available luxury units offered for sale. For the past three years, we have typically been running 21-33 percent closed luxury market transactions in the OMCAR MLS.
• Of the closed luxury on market sales, Golden Ocala homes represented 8 percent of the closed transactions.
• Of the first quarter’s 24 OMCAR sales, two were Golden Ocala homes – one at $650,000 and one at $1,525,000. The developer also had one additional Eagles Landing Sale that did set a record through the MLS.

Contact Golden Ocala To Learn How Our Agents Can Help

Please feel free to call us anytime to give you a current market analysis on your home. We are the company that brings people to Ocala in addition to Golden Ocala and our agents can service your real estate needs both inside and outside the gates.

Our offices are open seven days a week and evenings by appointment. Stop by and see us; we have new models and floor plans to show you. We are here to serve you with all your real estate needs.

Contact us at 352-369-6969.