How To Find Value Difference Of High Bank And Low Bank Waterfront?

[Awesomematt]

How to find value difference of high bank and low bank waterfront?
Any easy ways to find the value?

 

[KHS445]

Sure is. Some may depend on if it is a vacant or occupied site. For raw numbers/percentage I would search for closed sales of low and high bluff vacant sites and try to come up with some sort of percentage or ratio. Don't be afraid to go back three to five years in an effort to find enough sales to establish strong support for your adjustment. So if low bluff sites sell for a 25% premium over high bluff sites you could then apply this percentage to your assignment and see how it works out. Can also look at using the same percentage for improved property comparables and see how that works out. As with any matched pairs analysis this adjustment is just one of many you will need to consider, but it is probably one of the easier ones to document if you have the closed sales to work with.

Not sure about your area of the world, but in my area no to low bluff Lake Michigan frontage runs from $3,500 to $4,500 a front foot and high bluff property can be bought in the $400 to $1,100 per front foot range. Good luck.

 

[NWolvie]

Easy? Not really. But that's why you should be getting a higher fee for waterfront. When I'm doing waterfront (especially on the Sound), I always run extraction analysis on all of my closed sales. Recently, I've been using the National Building Cost manual for that.

 

[Elliott]

Many years ago I did an appraisal where a couple of Alaska attorney's purchased a manufactured home and a couple of acres that was on an island in the Columbia River. They discovered that they had purchased water frontage on a nude beach. Virtually everyone in Oregon knows the beaches (mean low to mean high) are owned by the State of Oregon (Oregon Beach Bill by Gov. Tom "Come to Oregon but Don't Stay") McCall.

The attorney's decided to put a barbed wire fence on the beach and were immediately told they didn't own the beach and 'yes' nude sun bathers would walk across 'their' beach. They sued the title company. I was hired to estimate their loss in value of a fairly narrow 25' strip of beach. It was sort of like a eminent domain case. What's the value of the homesite to high water and since the State controls high to low, what sum of money would make them whole. It wasn't much.