It takes some guts to fly the lake off the tee at Scotch Hall Preserve's 2nd hole on its Arnold Palmer designed golf course. It takes sharp pricing to sell golf community lots into the teeth of a recession, and Scotch Hall Preserve is certainly making a strong effort in that regard.
The Albemarle Sound in North Carolina is as beautiful a body of water as you will find on the east coast, but only two golf communities use it as backdrop. Recently, I visited the newer one of them, Scotch Hall Preserve, in the tiny town of Merry Hill. (The other is Albemarle Plantation in Hertford.) I'll offer more comprehensive thoughts about Scotch Hall here in the coming days, but suffice to say that the developer pricing for home sites reflects what has happened to the leisure residential market since 2006. A few remaining 3/4 acre waterfront lots are priced at $250,000 each, just 25% of what you would pay for a similar lot in, say, the Myrtle Beach area and an even smaller percentage of the cost of a similar home site on one of the popular barrier islands farther south (e.g. Kiawah).
