Oahu Home Tours: Gated Kailua Townhome on 50 Acres Fronting a Golf Course | Market Update

This townhome in Kailua sits on nearly 50 acres. It's wrapped in preservation land and fronting a golf course. If you just heard that, almost 50 acres of land, a golf course in front, conservation land wrapping around the back, and you're trying to figure out how a townhome in Kailua ends up feeling like that, stay with me. Because by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly what you're paying for here on Oahu and whether it actually holds up. So here's what we're going to do today. I'm going to show you what it costs to live behind these gates and what that money is really buying. I'm going to tell you whether Kailua right now is a buyer's market or a seller's market. And the answer is not the same as the rest of the island. I'm going to walk you through this three level townhome, top to bottom. And then if you stay to the end, I'm going to take you out into the grounds. The part that honestly felt less like walking a condo property and more like a hike. There's a reason this place feels the way it does and the numbers explain it. We are back in Kailua. But here's what makes today a little different. Every single time we've broken down this market together, we've looked at single family homes. Today for the first time, we're going into the condo and townhome side. It's a separate market with its own rules and the numbers do move differently. So everything I show you today is measured townhome to townhome, condo to condo, apples to apples. And that matters because if you've only ever heard the single family story, you've been missing half the picture. I'm not just going to point at rooms and tell you they're nice. I'm going to give you the real data. What's selling, what's sitting, what buyers are actually paying, and what it all means for you. Whether you're buying or whether you're thinking about selling. Let's get into it. One detail I liked, the television actually slides out and pivots so you can angle it toward the dining side or back toward the living side, depending on where everyone's sitting. Small thing, but it tells you the home was lived in thoughtfully. The kitchen has custom cabinetry, full appliances, dishwasher, the refrigerator, a proper pantry tucked off to the side, and the view follows you the entire time. From the kitchen, from the living room, from the dining table. The kitchen, the living room, and the dining all flowing together, all pointed at that same view. Right away you can see the two things the listing leans on. The golf course out in front, and the Ko'olau Mountain standing up behind it. That golf course is the Mid-Pacific Country Club, and it's worth knowing a little about what you're looking at because it's not a driving range somebody dropped in last year. That course was designed by Seth Rayner and it opened back in 1926. It's a private members-only club, invitation only, almost 100 years old. Now I want to be straight with you. Fronting the course is not the same as having a membership to it. Owning here does not put you on that course. What it does is something arguably more valuable for the long run. It means the wide open green in front of you is permanent. Nobody is building a wall of units between you and that view because that land is a golf course, and it's going to stay a golf course, and behind the property it's the same idea from the other direction. That's preservation land with hiking trails running through it, protected open space in front and protected open space behind. And this is a good place to give you the first real number because it sets up everything else. Let's talk about whether Kailua is a buyer's market or a seller's market right now, for condos and townhomes specifically. The way you measure that is something called months of supply. All it means is if no new listings came on at all, how long would it take to sell everything that's currently for sale? Under three months is a seller's market. Sellers have the leverage. Three to six months is balanced. Over six months, buyers have the leverage. Here's where it gets interesting. The entire Oahu condo and townhome market is sitting right around six months of supply. That's the soft end. That tilts toward buyers. But Kailua on its own, around three and a half months. Kailua condos and townhomes are tighter than the island as a whole. So if you've been shopping the broader Oahu market and feeling like you had time to think it over, and then you came to Kailua and it felt faster, more competitive, you weren't imagining that. Now let me layer some market reality over all this beauty, because pretty grounds are nice, but I want you to understand the investment underneath them. Here's a number that should matter to every single person watching, buyer or seller. New listings in Kailua on the condo and townhome side are down across the board compared to a year ago. Down roughly 10 to 15 percent depending on how you slice it. Fewer owners are choosing to sell. So if you're a buyer and it feels like there's nothing good out there, like you're chasing the few listings as everybody else, that's not bad luck. That's the actual market. The supply has tightened. And if you're an owner thinking about selling, flip that around. Fewer listings means less competition for your home. A well-priced, well-presented home in Kailua right now is going up against a thinner field than it would have a year ago. That's leverage, but only if you price it right from day one. And real quick, if this is the kind of breakdown you want on a home before you ever step inside it, the actual market behind the listing, not just the pretty pictures, do me a favor and hit subscribe. This is what we do on every single home. Let's keep going. Up on the top level, you've got the primary suite and the primary bedroom and its own bathroom, with the other two bedrooms set down on the lower level. Like the rest of the home, what's up here looks out at the golf course and the mountains. So rather than walk you through it room by room, let me give you the numbers that actually tell you what this home is worth. Let's start with where it sits against the market. The typical condo or townhome in Kailua has been selling right around $830,000. This home is listed at just over $1.5 million. So why the gap? It's almost entirely the land and the setting. 50 plus acres, gated, protected on both sides. You're not comparing this to a standard Kailua condo, and you shouldn't. The right comparison is the three bedroom homes inside these same gates. And those have been trading right in the $1.5 to $1.6 million range over the past year. This home, listed just over $1.5 million, sits right in line with that, actually a touch, under where the three bedrooms in here have been settling. So the asking price isn't reaching above the community. It's sitting right in the pocket of it. And speaking of pricing it right, let me explain why Bluestone's numbers can look wild if you don't know how to read them, and why having someone who does read them correctly actually protects you. This community is what we call thinly traded. Across all of these homes, only about 16 sold in the last year. That's it. When a community trades that lightly, one single sale can swing the averages dramatically. So you might pull up a stat that says prices here crashed, or that homes are sitting for 150 days. And if you don't know the context, you panic, or you miss price, or you walk away from a good home for a bad reason. The truth is, one smaller two bedroom unit that took a long time to sell can drag the whole average sideways for months. And it tells you nothing about a three bedroom like this one. This is exactly the kind of thing that separates reading a real estate website from getting real analysis. The headline number is often a trap. The real number is underneath it. Down on the lower level is where the other two bedrooms sit, along with the laundry, full-size washer and dryer, a utility sink, and that spacious walk-in storage. Three separate levels. Your own front door, your own attached garage. You're not sharing a hallway or a wall-to-wall floor with anybody. Which by the way, an attached full-size garage plus driveway, parking for two more vehicles, so four spots total, is almost unheard of for a Kailua condo. And while we're standing in the home itself, let me give you a number that I think tells the truest story of all. Because it's about this exact unit, not the building, not the average. This home. This is public record, so I can share it. This same townhome sold back in 2013 for about $900,000. It sold again in 2021 for about $1,375,000. And today it's listed at $1,539,000. So you're watching in real time what a well-located Kailua townhome does over a decade plus. From $900,000 to over a million and a half. That's the long-term case for a place like this in one clean line. And for what it's worth, that current list price is actually sitting just under the county's 2026 assessed value for the home. I'm not here to tell you it's the deal of the century. I'm telling you the asking price is grounded in the numbers, not floating above them. Now let's talk about what you actually pay every month to live here. Because this is where a lot of condo buyers get caught off guard. And I never want that to be you. The maintenance fee here runs about $1,860 a month. That is on the higher side for Kailua, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But you have to look at what it covers before you react to the number. That fee includes your cable, your internet, your water, your sewer, and all the common area expenses. The pool, the sauna, the tennis and pickleball, the grounds, and the security patrol that comes with a gated community. So some of what feels like a big fee is just bills you'd be paying separately anyway, bundled into one. The smart move for any buyer is to have your lender run the full monthly picture. Mortgage, property taxes, and that maintenance fee all together. So you're looking at the real cost of ownership, not just the sticker price. No surprises. That's how you buy with your eyes open. While we're moving through the lower level, the laundry and the storage, let me give you the numbers that actually matter if you're buying or selling in here. Because this is the stuff that never shows up in the photos. Start with how fast homes move. On a full year basis, homes in this community take somewhere in the mid 40s of days to sell. Call it about a month and a half. Across Kailua condos and townhomes generally, it's closer to 30 days, which is actually a touch faster than the Oahu market overall. But here's the part to watch. That time on market has been climbing compared to last year. The market hasn't fallen off a cliff, but it has cooled from where it was. For a buyer, that's good news. A little more room to think and a little more room to negotiate than you had a year or two ago. Now, how much room? Sellers in here have been getting over the past year, around 97% of their asking price. Across Kailua condos and townhomes, it's closer to 99. So nobody's paying wildly over ask. This is not a bidding war market, but sellers aren't giving it away either. Translation for a buyer, expect a real but modest negotiation. Low single digits off the asking price on a typical deal. And for a seller, price close to true value because the market is not going to bail out an overpriced home with some surprise over ask offer. Coming out through the garage, you get your first real look at the place from the street, the gated entry and how quiet it is out front. This is a gated community with key entry, a security patrol and cameras. It's a private controlled watched over place. And for some buyers, that matters more than any single feature inside the home. Take a second on the setting too. You're up in the hills of Kailua, set back off the main roads with the golf course rolling out in front and the home stepped into the slope behind. And here's something worth knowing. If you've been shopping this side of the island, a gated townhome community like this one is rare in Kailua. There honestly isn't much else like it out here. So before we even walk into the grounds, understand that a big piece of the value is sitting right in front of you from the street, the gate, the privacy, and the simple fact that there's almost nothing else you could buy out here that offers the same thing. Now this, this is the part I really wanted you to stay for. Once you're through the gate and into the grounds, the whole place opens up. This complex has the full set of resort style amenities too. A pool and whirlpool, a sauna, tennis and pickleball courts, barbecue areas, a clubhouse, and walking and jogging paths winding all through it. I'm not going to walk you right up to the pool. There were people enjoying it when I came through and I'm not about to put strangers on camera. But we'll take in the grounds So here's the scale. Almost 50 acres and only around 150 some homes share all of it. Sit with that for a second. That is an enormous amount of land for that few homes. Most condo communities pack you in. This one does the opposite. That ratio, that much green space spread across that few homes is the entire reason walking these grounds feels the way it does. I kept telling people afterward it didn't feel like I was walking a condo complex. It felt like I was on a trail. You've got mature landscaping, big old trees, paths that wind and roll with the hillside instead of cutting straight lines and the whole time the mountains are on one side and the golf course on the other. The birds are constant up here. It's the kind of quiet you don't expect to find this close to town. And let me clear up one more piece of fine print that really matters on Oahu because a lot of buyers don't even know to ask. Every home in this community is fee simple. Let me explain what that means and why you should care. Fee simple means you own the land underneath your home outright. It's yours. The other kind you'll see all over Oahu is leasehold and that's where it gets tricky. With leasehold you own the building but you don't own the land. You're paying rent on the land to whoever owns it We call them the fee owner or the land owner and that lease has an end date. Now I want to correct something you'll hear people say because it's not quite right. The value doesn't just fall off a cliff the day the lease ends. What actually happens is slower and trickier. The closer you get to that expiration the more the value erodes. So instead of appreciating the way a fee simple home does a leasehold tends to depreciate as the clock runs down and at the very end the land owner can either offer to extend your lease or choose not to. And if they don't you hand the property back and you walk away with nothing. On top of that the lease has rent increases built right into it. So the thing to always watch for is when that next increase hits and how big it could be. Let me tell you a real story because this is the kind of thing that costs people real money. I recently sold a leasehold listing in Hawaii Kai. A beautiful waterfront townhome, three bedrooms right on the water. When my sellers originally bought it with a different agent the land rent was about $2,600 a year and the maintenance fee was around $700 a month which is reasonable for a waterfront townhome The lease ran all the way until 2044. So on paper it looked like a good deal. They got it for far less than a fee simple home would have cost. But here's what got missed. That land lease was due to be renegotiated in 2019. These leases usually reset every 10 years or so. Appraisers are hired to revalue the land and set the new rent. In that particular complex the increases had actually been stepping up over the years from $850 a year to $1,500 up to that $2,600 a year but only through November of 2019. Which means the land itself had not been revalued since 1988. My sellers bought in May of 2019 and that November just months later the land rent jumped from $2,600 a year to over $2,000 a month. That is more than $24,000 a year almost overnight. Now they couldn't have known the exact number but knowing that an increase was coming and that the land hadn't been revalued since 1988 would have told them it was going to be a big one. And here's the part that really sticks with me. They actually had the paperwork. It was all right there in the documents the information was never hidden. But reading it and understanding what it truly meant that land in Hawaii Kai had appreciated enormously since 1988 and that all of that appreciation was about to land in a single renegotiation. That takes a very specific kind of knowledge that most people just don't have. So it wasn't a hidden problem. It was an interpretation and knowledge problem. That's the lesson leasehold can absolutely work for the right person and sometimes you even get the chance to buy the land and convert it to fee simple. But you have to dig into that land lease. Understand exactly when the next increase lands, how it's calculated and what you're signing up for years down the road. So when I tell you this home is fee simple what I'm really telling you is there's no lease clock ticking, no land rent, no surprise jump waiting for you down the line. You own it. Free and clear of all of that. On a condo or townhome especially that is exactly what you want to see. And the layout of the community itself tells a story. The open space and the protection of it. Because this is where the long-term value lives. Remember the golf course out front and the conservation land behind? Here's why that's not just scenery. That preservation land is zoned to stay preservation land. The golf course functions the same way. So the open feeling you get standing out here isn't a temporary gift that some developer can take away in five years by building the next tower. It's structural. It's baked into the zoning and the land itself. When you buy here a big part of what you're buying is the near certainty that the view and the breathing room you fell in love with today will still be here in 20 years. That is rare and it's a real piece of the value even though it never shows up in the square footage. And before we wrap here's something most people watching have no idea even happens behind the scenes. I don't just track what's for sale. I track what tried to sell and didn't. The listings that came on and then came back off the market without closing. Inside this community over the last year a couple of owners listed and then pulled their homes without selling. That's useful information. Sometimes an owner pulls a listing and is still very much a motivated seller who just needs the right buyer to come along quietly. So if you've been watching homes on Oahu, if you've walked these grounds and just haven't found the right home, come up for sale. Reach out to me directly. I keep tabs on every listing, every cancellation, and every quiet opportunity in the communities I cover. Sometimes the right home for you is one that isn't technically on the market today. That's the kind of thing you only find with someone who's actually watching the whole board. So let's land this. What you've got here is a three bedroom, two and a half bath townhome. Just under 2,000 square feet of living space. With an attached garage and parking for four cars total. There are three covered outdoor areas built to catch the trade winds, golf course, and mountain and sunset views. Inside a gated fee simple community on almost 50 acres of protected land. Listed right around one and a half million dollars. And more importantly, you now understand the market underneath it. That Kailua's condo and townhome side is tighter than the island overall. That the headline stats can lie in a thinly traded community like this one. And what it actually costs month to month to live behind these gates. That's the difference between looking at a home and understanding one. If you're thinking about buying here or selling here, or you just want the same kind of honest breakdown on a home you've got your eye on anywhere on Oahu, reach out. It's what I do and I'd love to help you make a smart, clear-eyed decision. I'm Oksana with Island Living Oahu. Subscribe and I'll see you on the next one.