I ate dinner at the Abbey Springs Yacht Club last weekend. I had a salad, a selection dictated by my morbid obesity, a salad with chicken and corn and some jicama and other various things. There was lettuce as well. The salad was good, though my wife ordered the same one and didn't like it quite as much as I did. But I was hungrier than she was, which is normal, so perhaps to me at that time anything would have tasted good- even jicama. The restaurant was full, the mood light, the evening sun fading, the water as blue as blue could ever be. It was a nice night.

I like Abbey Springs. I like their golf course and I like their tunnel under South Lakeshore Drive, and I like their jicama salad. I also like the market there, and feel that for the right buyer at just the right time it's a perfect fit. The dues are a bit severe, so I routinely counsel clients to avoid the place unless they plan on utilizing all of the amenities that spring forth from Abbey Springs like, well, like a spring. If a vacation home buyer is active and in need of many different activities to fill up their weekends, then Abbey Springs is a perfect fit.

I've written at great lengths of the remarkable performance of Abbey Springs over the past four years of broader malaise. The market has outperformed pretty much every other market here, in terms not just of volume considerations but of general market performance- price declines, steady volume, etc. While other markets crumbled, Abbey Springs soldiered on. I've said this often. So today, on the day of this market update, it was slightly surprising to me as it might be to you to learn that the MLS doesn't show a single unit pending sale at Abbey Springs. Abbey Springs is not happy about this.

I had a few months a few years ago where I was sort of rooting against Abbey Springs. Not outwardly, but privately. I kind of felt that Abbey Springs had no real reason to be immune to the pressures of the broader market decline, and that sooner or later they too would melt under the weight of a national crisis. I don't like that I feel that way at times, this vindictive side of me, but I'm telling you the truth, as I always do. The market slow down right now at Abbey Springs has nothing to do with some sort of delayed response to the housing crisis. It isn't indicative of any growing concern. It is simply a cyclical market playing out a brief slowdown. There is nothing to be concerned about.

Abbey Springs has 33 active properties on the MLS ranging in price from $149k to nearly $2MM. Do not ask me what I think about paying $2MM for a property in Abbey Springs. Don't do it! But now that I've said that it will probably sell, in which case I should be thanked. I have always liked Abbey Springs for a condo option in the $250k to $350k range, as the inventory competes nicely with the broader market as long as buyers prefer to skimp on square footage in order to indulge on amenities. There is value here, and the brief slowdown can work to a motivated buyer's favor in negotiations.