THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 24, 1996 TAG: 9602220233
SECTION: REAL ESTATE WEEKLY PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: ABOUT THE OUTER BANKS
SOURCE: Chris Kidder
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
In last week's installment of the Pine Island rental wars, I said that Twiddy & Co.'s six Pine Island houses rented for an average of 38 weeks last year. The correct figure is 22.4 weeks.
As good as the 38 weeks sounded, Jackie Myers, Twiddy's rental manager, was on the phone with me first thing Monday morning. ``What you printed isn't right. We obviously misunderstood each other,'' she said. ``You need to get the correct information, please, and print that.''
Myers and I had talked at length about the Pine Island situation and Twiddy's experience. But she was talking in terms of average weekly rent (38, an agent's shorthand for $3,800) while I was speaking of weeks rented (as in 38 weeks).
It was one of those conversations, in retrospect, fraught with ambiguity as we bandied the number around without defining it.
Since I should be the professional communicator, I owe Myers an apology. She had a lot of explaining to do when eager Pine Island owners began calling to find out how they, too, could get in on Twiddy's rental bonanza.
I had calls, too, from incredulous readers wondering if so many weeks were even possible. Possible, yes; probable, no: Not without year-round sports facilities like Corolla Light and Schooner Ridge, where in years past a few properties have topped out around 35 weeks.
Pine Island seems to be a resort making its own rules when it comes to vacation rentals, It's broken the $6,000 weekly rent in season, for example. But when it comes to weeks rented, the rule, so far, has been far fewer than 38 weeks a year.
I live in Virginia Beach and own a piece of land in Kill Devil Hills,'' wrote a reader. ``I'd like to find a home that could be moved to my lot. Do you know any points of contact that can match me with an owner wanting to sell their structure?''
Recycling houses, moving them from one location to another, is a longstanding Outer Banks tradition born of necessity.
Early Bankers had limited access to new building materials. Houses were simple in design: without permanent foundations, with no plaster on the walls and with chimneys that could be easily dismantled and reassembled on outside walls.
It was often just as easy to push a house off its pilings and drag or roll it across the sand to a new location than to take it apart and rebuild it.
When cottages were built on the oceanside of the islands after the Civil War, these building practices proved especially useful. There was no beachfront dune line in those days; storm tides flooded the barrier islands from ocean to sound.
Contrary to current popular wisdom, shoreline erosion was a fact of life even then. And as the landscape was re-formed after each storm, houses were moved back to escape the tides.
S.J. Twine, the Elizabeth City builder credited with building or renovating dozens of Nags Head beach cottages in the early part of this century, was a house mover as well.
According to Catherine Bishir, the state's architectural historian, after each big storm, ``Twine would put the storm-battered cottages on rollers and move them back along the beach to a distance which seemed safe from the sea for a time.''
Several of Twine's cottages still stand but few, if any, of them are in the locations where he left them. Today, beach erosion is still the major reason for moving houses on the Outer Banks. A growing factor is the real estate concept of ``best use'' of the land: removing an older house from oceanfront lots often increases the property's value.
Getting a house moved these days isn't nearly as easy as it once was. And it may not be a ``cheap'' way to go.
The hardest part of house moving is probably getting up with a mover. There are no house moving companies on the Outer Banks. The three companies handling most of the business are Abode Movers (Shiloh, N.C.), Bray House Movers (Camden) and Hare Worth & Son (Edenton).
Contractors tell me that none of these companies lacks work. They're small, family-run operations. My personal experience has been that calls during normal business hours put you in touch with an answering machine. Unless you're a known contractor, your calls may not be returned.
While movers might be a good source for tips on available houses, contractors who have experience in salvaging unwanted buildings are a better bet. This is business that transpires primarily by word of mouth.
Nags Head general contractor Dave Ferris has been involved in a dozen house moves over the last four years. Half were houses being moved to a new location. His experience is that the cost of moving and renovation usually costs more money than building a comparable new house.
``Occasionally you find a bargain,'' Ferris says. ``And it can make more practical sense if you already own the lot.''
The move itself will run between $5,000 and $15,000, depending on the size and weight of the house. For the moving company, most of the cost is in jacking the house on and off the truck, not in how far the house has to travel.
But moving costs don't stop with the house movers. An even bigger expense is the cost to move utility lines that hang along the move path.
One developer wanted to buy a historic Kitty Hawk building and move it to a lot he owned in Nags Head - until he found out that 80 or 90 power lines would need to be moved. The bill for that could have been ``$100,000, easy,'' he says.
Next week we'll look at a house that was moved from the oceanfront to a soundside location and turned into a successful rental property. The contractor and the owner have some good advice for others interested in recycling old houses. MEMO: Send comments and questions to Chris Kidder at P.O. Box 10, Nags Head,
N.C. 27959. Or e-mail her at realkidd(AT)aol.com
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by CHRIS KIDDER
Renovations prompted a recent retreat from the shrinking beachfront
for one old Nags Head cottage. According to the contractor, the
house had also been moved after the Ash Wednesday Storm of '62.
by CNB