Md. luxury home market on the upswing

In early March, former Baltimore Orioles’ star Adam Jones and his wife put their Reisterstown estate — formerly owned and built by another Orioles’ star, Cal Ripken Jr. — up for sale.

The six-bedroom, 22,000 square-foot home sits on 24 secluded acres and among its amenities are an indoor theater, regulation-sized baseball field, two four-car garages, a world-class gym and much more. The asking price was a whopping $3,995,000, and the inquiries, according to Karen Hubble Bisbee of Long & Foster Real Estate, poured in.

“It’s been on the market for only two days, and I can’t tell you how much interest we’ve had in it,” she said earlier this month.

To Bisbee, who specializes in luxury homes in the Baltimore area, that sky-high interest in a $4 million property was a case study on what’s going on in the Baltimore region’s luxury real-estate market — a sign that 2019, as she put it, “is going to be a really healthy, robust year.”

Although the city is known for its affordable housing, the Baltimore region has always had a high-end housing market. Those homes can be found in all jurisdictions — on waterfront property in Anne Arundel county, on large, wooded properties in Howard and Baltimore counties, in the areas of Guilford, Roland Park and downtown Baltimore, in the form of luxury condos with impressive waterfront views.

The market has its ups and downs, and while the future can be uncertain, several real estate experts in the area agreed with Bisbee that the market for high-end homes is on an upswing.

Creig Northrop, head of the Howard County-based Northrop Realty, a Long & Foster Company, said that late last year he was expecting a less-than-stellar 2019, based on expected interest rate hikes and exacerbated by the federal government shutdown.

However, the shutdown ended up keeping interest rates low, as regulators struggled to spur the economy, and then the federal workers went back to work. The net result, Northrop said, “was sort of like a fusion combustion — it sparked the market. It was amazing.”

He added: “You have to build confidence, create an economy that’s secure. When you do that, people trade up and the luxury market just blossoms. Which is what it’s doing now.

“It’s a good time to buy or sell luxury.”

But Northrop, whose agency sold about 100 homes for $900,000 or more last year, had a warning:  Interest rate hikes will not be postponed forever.

“If I’m looking to sell a luxury property, I’m selling it this year,” he said.

Ross Mackesey, branch manager for Long and Foster’s Lake Roland office, which sells a hefty portion of high-end homes, agreed that low-interest rates and consumer confidence in the economy should make this a good spring — traditionally a peak time for home sales — for the luxury market.

“I think people think this might be the last time they’ll be able to grab these low-interest rates,” he said. “And consumer confidence is still very good, which is very important to the real estate market.”

Baltimore’s market has fewer ups and downs than much of the country, Mackesey added, because its top employers — Johns Hopkins University and Hopkins Health System, the University of Maryland Medical Center, even Northrop Grumman, with its emphasis on defense projects — are largely immune from economic and employment swings (and government shutdowns).

Nick Waldner, owner and chief executive officer of the Waldner Winters Team, real estate brokers based in Columbia, was slightly less optimistic than others about the area’s luxury home market.

While homes are still selling at near-record highs, he said, prices are not rising at the same rate as a couple of years ago, in part because the once low inventory of available homes is rising.

“There’s definitely a luxury market in the area,” he said. “It’s not doing excellent, it’s not doing poorly. It’s doing well for what it is.”

Bisbee said a more educated public, familiar with the vast amounts of information on real estate available at the click of a keyboard, also has helped the high-end market. Sellers are more realistic about pricing their homes, while buyers are savvier and informed about what they can get and for how much.

“All that information has been a tremendous help to the real estate industry,” Bisbee said. “It makes for better buyers and sellers.”