Lakeside Villas of Scottsdale 1 is a 60 unit condo development along the eastern bank of Lake Marguerite in McCormick Ranch. Originally developed in the mid 1980s, these units couldn’t be more ideally located. Steps from not only the lake, but the walking / multi-use path, restaurants, coffee spots, and shops of the ever-popular Mercado Del Lago center on the NW corner of Hayden Rd and Via De Ventura, this complex has long been a favorite of winter visitors and full time residents alike for the walkable community amenities.
Of the 60 total units, 52 are single level. There are 8 multi-level units. The average unit size is approximately 1381 livable sq ft. City zoning is R-5 for multi-family, residential use. Units typically include a single garage stall.
The complex is gated, has a community pool w/ cabana & heated spa. In addition to immediate access to the lake and dining/shopping, the walking path also traces the McCormick Ranch Golf Club course when followed south of Via De Ventura.
Lake Marguerite in McCormick RanchMcCormick Ranch Golf CourseCamelback WalkThe Railroad Park in McCormick RanchLake Marguerite DamLake Marguerite in McCormick RanchMcCormick Ranch SignMcCormick Ranch Shopping & Dining
Monthly dues are in the $300-400 range as of 2026, in addition to the annual McCormick Ranch planned community fee (currently $265 as of 2026 – one of the best values in all of Arizona).
Ready to find your own home in Lakeside Villas of Scottsdale? Start your search here!
This axiom applies to just about every human endeavor. Whether an endurance contest or a high stakes business transaction, the same holds true: all that matters is the end result. In the former example, some athletes prefer to race to the front of the pack from the starter’s gun. Rabbits, if you will. Others prefer to lay back and conserve energy for a steady pace and stronger finishing kick. Tortoises. Neither strategy is inherently right nor wrong, just a matter of strategic preference based on skillsets and personality types.
The same is true in business negotiation. Some are highly aggressive from the start, while others hold back a bit in anticipation of a long, drawn out process. Some cut to the chase. Some prefer a more gradual progression towards the most advantageous terms.
When pricing a home for sale, a standard tactic is to list it at or slightly above market value in anticipation of some negotiation. Knowing that buyers don’t like paying sticker price and expect to negotiate some of the “fluff” out of a list price, sellers and listing agents are conditioned to add some into their pricing.
You want $500,000? You price it at $529,000.
You want $1,000,000? You price it at $1,049,000.
With a little luck, maybe you even get a little more than your target sale price.
This is the time honored and traditional method of pricing a home for sale. Largely because it is effective. Grossly overpriced homes don’t sell. They just sit on the market, stagnant. Homes priced appropriately for the current market will usually sell in line with standard averages in terms of both price and speed.
But what if you want to sell faster than the average? Maybe you don’t have 30-90 days to waste? Perhaps, outside factors make speed a higher than normal factor. Major life changes, concerns about the direction of the financial and real estate markets, and even just an impatient personality might encourage a seller to adopt a different strategy.
Namely, strategic underpricing.
Not to be confused with undervaluing or fire-selling a home, strategic underpricing can prove useful in obtaining the highest price the market will bear for a property in the shortest amount of time possible.
When you intentionally price a home below its estimated current market value, you instantly create more demand for the property. It’s the most basic law of supply and demand. Everyone likes a low price, after all. If a desirable home in a desirable community hits the market for $50,000 – $100,000 below recent sales of comparable properties, for example, you can bet that people will line up to buy it. The same isn’t typically true for homes priced $50,000 – $100,000 above recent sales outside of wildly overheated markets.
A fast sale is only half of the equation, however. The other half is leveraging all that demand to obtain full market value. Giving the house away is not a winning strategy.
The low list price gets the market’s attention. Next, the home needs to be marketed effectively to build some anticipation prior to accepting offers. This can be accomplished with “coming soon” advertising. Let the market know about it prior to going active in the MLS. You will likely have buyers lined up for showings by the time you go live.
Make it an event. Hold a grand opening style open house to kickstart showings. Let prospective buyers see firsthand just how desirable the home is to competing parties by the traffic alone.
Don’t accept the first offer that comes in, no matter how good it is. Clearly spell out to all interested parties that you will be fielding offers through X date and time (typically 5-7 days). Fully anticipating multiple offers, requesting “highest and best” offers by that date sends the clear signal that you expect the price to go up rather than be negotiated down.
You are looking to spark a bidding war, which when handled properly, can not only lead to the price getting pushed up well beyond your initial asking price, but with superior terms as well. In competitive situations, buyers may add an “escalation clause” to their offers, which matches or beats any higher competing offer by a specified amount. Buyers may agree to accept the home “as is” with no repairs. Perhaps, a buyer will be willing to waive the financing and appraisal contingencies, making their earnest money non-refundable if they fail to get their loan or the house doesn’t appraise for the purchase price. The possibilities are limited only by creativity and the desire to win.
This isn’t a strategy for everyone. Some don’t like the gamesmanship of playing one party against another. Some don’t like the added stress and logistics of weighing multiple offers against each other, preferring to deal with one party at a time. Some don’t like the idea of the predicted bidding war not materializing, leaving them with a lower than hoped for sales price.
If that frantic burst of activity upon entry to the market isn’t for you, or you have a trickier property that requires a very specific buyer (and is, therefore, less likely to spark a competitive bidding war), stick to a more traditional strategy.
If you are a rabbit who wants it done NOW with a bold approach, however, strategic underpricing might be optimal.
After all, while it’s very easy to overprice a home, it’s very difficult to underprice a home. The market will push a home up to its current market value just as reliably as it will push it down.
You just have to know how to play the game.
Is strategic underpricing the right strategy for you and your home?
People filed into the 1920s Craftsman nestled in a downtown Phoenix historic district. Most were armed with gift bags or bottles of wine with bows affixed to the neck. All wore big grins above the turtlenecks or cardigans they donned against the blustery late autumn afternoon. An excitable, merle Yorkiepoo on hopping hind legs greeted each new arrival on the porch. Of the cars stretched up and down the tree-lined street, there was a conspicuous preponderance of small hybrid and electric vehicles.
Hector and Peter received their guests in the great room they had created by demolishing the walls that previously divided a living room, family room, and kitchen. Gifts piled up on the soapstone counter of the kitchen island, which was large enough to be its own continent within the sea of old world charm and new world luxury that the couple had painstakingly curated over the past year. Soft jazz played on an unseen Alexa. The centerpiece of the entire space, a massive spanish-tiled fireplace was prepped with logs, but unlit beneath the reclaimed driftwood mantel despite the dreary weather.
Guests mingled and made small talk in between trips to the antique dining table for appetizers. Its drop leaves fully upright for the occasion, it held platters of shrimp cocktail, aged cheeses, exotic fruit, and fresh, organic veggies. The aroma of fair trade Bolivian coffee that percolated on the bar top made its way to every nose in the house. Clad in black tuxedos with green ties and cummerbunds, waiters circulated amongst the revelers with flutes of champagne, as well as sparkling cider for the non-drinkers.
Fifteen minutes after the arrival of the last guest, Hector cut through the conversations around him by clinking a fork against his glass. Only when the most boisterous conversationalists finally took notice did he begin to speak.
“Distinguished guests,” he greeted with as much force as his thin voice would allow, “Thank you all for coming today. Even you, Dorothy.”
Polite chuckles and several catcalls arose from the crowd as a skeletal woman with severe eye makeup and a shock of silver running through her spiked, jet-black hair affected a deep curtsy in response.
“As you all know, Peter has been hard at work honing this diamond in the rough into the jewel you now see today,” he continued, gesturing at his sheepish husband who was attempting to disappear behind him. The size disparity between the couple making the spectacle absurdly hilarious, another wave of laughter rippled through the crowd.
“It was a team effort,” the towering architect demurred.
His voice was a deep, throaty bass that didn’t match his demeanor. The vertical stripes on his grey suit may have been slimming, but they also made him loom even larger than his six foot six frame normally did despite his cowering.
“Shush,” Hector chided him. “Peter did everything. Drew the plans. Selected the finishes. Met with all the contractors. I just paid the AMEX bill and yelled at people on the phone.”
Another chuckle from the crowd.
“Accept your flowers, honey,” he insisted, raising his glass. “To Peter!”
“To Peter,” the crowd echoed back.
Peter took a reluctant half bow as everyone took a sip of champagne or cider.
“But this isn’t just a housewarming party,” Hector continued when the voices died down. “We fibbed a little bit on the invitations. Peter and I invited all of you here today to make an announcement.”
The crowd tittered.
“Oh my God, you’re adopting,” one guest gushed.
“Where from,” another demanded. “Russia? Africa?”
“No, no, nothing on that front yet,” Hector corrected them. “We are still buried on all the waiting lists. Things have gotten more complicated in the last couple of years, but we remain hopeful. China is looking promising.”
He held up crossed fingers before lowering his hand and taking Peter’s.
“This is a gender reveal party,” Peter boomed, finding his voice.
The crowd stared back at the smiling couple with blank stares.
“Gender reveal,” a slight man in a top hat and overcoat asked. “You just said there was no baby?”
“No, we just said the adoption hasn’t been approved yet,” Hector clarified. “This is our baby!”
He made sweeping gestures in all directions, The guests followed his hands, confused.
“What, the house,” one asked with a derisive scoff. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not, Chad,” Hector replied, offended. “Didn’t you name your car Christine?”
“Well, yes, but-“
“But what,” Hector pressed. “You assigned it a name.”
“It’s not the same,” the man squeaked. “I just named her for fun.”
“Ah, but why did you presume your car is a her,” Hector followed, well-practiced at the art of cross-examination.
“Come on, Hector. It’s a teal blue Tesla with cream leather interior, not a jacked up Ford.”
“That’s sexist and you know it,” he sang to the tune of the ubiquitous Right Said Fred tune.
“It’s a model Y, Chad,” he said with the air of a closing statement.
“But not an XY,” Chad sniffed, taking a step back in defeat.
“Anyone else have thoughts about this,” Hector quizzed his guests. “How about you, Daniel? I saw that look. Need I remind you that you refer to your hairless cat as ‘Them’?”
“Yeah, because They have nine lives,” A small disembodied voice answered. “Get it?”
“Look,” Hector announced. “It’s twenty twenty four, and the world has gotten scary enough. Half the country wants to cosplay the 1950s as it is. I didn’t expect our own friends and families to judge our choice to respect the right of our home to self-identify.”
“You’re right,” Chad said, reemerging from the crowd. “Hector, Peter, I am sorry for my closed-mindedness. I respect your choice and did not mean to offend you.”
“Thank you, Chad. No offense taken.”
Murmured approval went through the crowd.
“A house may not have an identity,” one surmised. “But a home is different. You pour your love and energy into a home. A home is a living thing. Of course it has feminine and/or masculine energy. Why wouldn’t it have a gender?”
Everyone looked at the mousy speaker, stunned, but nodding. Those standing near him pat him on the back and narrow shoulders.
“Percy,” Hector exclaimed, grabbing the wincing man in a fierce embrace. “You spoke!”
“Well, should we get this show on the road,” Peter asked, raising his voice above the din.
Replies to the affirmative rang out.
Peter withdrew a long lighter from his jacket pocket. He approached the fireplace and bent the long way down to the hearth. He turned to the throng of guests with a raised eyebrow, and touched the lighter to the firestarter brick beneath the waiting logs as cheers erupted.
“To the back yard,” Peter bellowed, leading the way as everyone hurried out of the house through the french doors, past the koi pond and herb garden to the lawn. There they craned their necks to watch the roofline.
“Pink smoke for a girl,” Peter announced. “Blue smoke for a boy!”
The anxious crowd waited.
“Definitely a girl,” one voice assured those around him. “Did you see those curtains?”
“Definitely a boy,” another challenged. “I haven’t seen that much red oak since the 1987 Boy Scout jamboree.”
Peter was about to return inside to make sure the fire was actually lit when the first few faint wisps of smoke appeared. Guests shushed each other as all attention turned to the chimney.
Cheers and I told yous went up as a light stream of pink trickled out of the roof. Only to be followed by opposing voices cheering as a trickle of blue chased it.
Peter cast a squinty-eyed look at Hector as a full rainbow of color billowed out of the chimney.
“What the fuck, Hector,” he whisper-scolded his partner. “What happened to green?”
They had settled on the home being gender neutral, at least until their tenth anniversary of home ownership, when the home’s identity would reveal itself organically rather than having one forced upon it. They had not even discussed its orientation.
“Oh lighten up, silly,” Hector responded with a glint in his dark eyes. “If Bob and Tina can fly that flag upside down and blast AM radio sermons every weekend, we can have a big gay house.”
He let the party-goers enjoy the spectacle for another minute before heading back inside to extinguish the fire. It was a no-burn day after all.
If I had a donut for every time I have been asked this question over the past quarter century, my whole family tree would have diabetes.
In the pantheon of real estate inquiries, it remains unrivaled. All other frequently asked questions flow from its headwaters. You never get to is this a good area, or how are the schools without first fielding the pre-requisite question that begets all others.
No one cares about the specifics until satisfied that buying a home at this (or any) particular time is a good idea in general.
Over the years, I’ve had different responses to that question based on current market forces, prognostications, etc. Sometimes it’s a no-brainer, like when the foreclosure and short sale market started to clear out on the back side of the great recession of the late aughts. It didn’t take much foresight to realize that prices had reached a nadir and were about to slingshot the other way.
Indeed, over a decade of value gains catapulted those fortuitous buyers to equity piggy banks larger than even the most optimistic predictions could have anticipated.
Similarly, there were clear signs in 2005-2006 that an impossibly hot market was bound to cool. Once again, it wasn’t too challenging to see a slowdown and potential value dip looming, even if the full scope of the crash was far beyond what anyone saw coming.
Beyond those times where there are bright flashing warning signs, however, what I have learned more than anything in this business is that the prognostication game is a fool’s errand. Things change too rapidly, and factors too numerous to account for and predict tend to upend forecast models with alarming regularity.
I have been expecting a dip in values since about 2018, convinced that price points have become unsustainable, particularly for entry level buyers. No entry level buyers means no move up buyers. And so on and so forth. It seemed the inexorable march of rising prices was fueled by artificially low interest rates. As soon as rates crept up in response to inflation, I just knew values would suffer as a result.
And I was dead wrong.
Sure, the market cooled when rates first shot up, and prices did see a modest dip. Not nearly as sharp of a decline as I expected, however, and it came much later than I expected.
If you listened to me and sold in 2019, you likely lost out on some additional gain. If you purchased despite my warnings, you realized additional gain.
Why didn’t it go the way I expected? Because homeowners that locked in 2.5 – 3% interest rates in the last five years are now refusing to move.
Why would they?
Those who would like to sell to upsize, downsize, move out of state, or whatever, will have to move somewhere. If they require financing to make the move, as many do, they can look forward to an interest rate that is, at minimum, double their current one.
Kinda kills the vibe.
Fewer sellers, means fewer options for today’s buyers. High demand and low supply has kept home prices high, despite affordability concerns.
The point being that the market is always as likely to zig as it is to zag, because the thing you think is gonna be the thing, turns out not to be the thing at all.
So when people come to me today, in 2024, asking if it’s a good time to buy, what do I tell them?
I answer the question with two of my own:
Are you financially able to purchase a house?
Does the security of being a homeowner outweigh the freedom from attachment that renting offers?
If you answer ‘yes’ to both of these questions, it’s a good time to buy a house. If you answer ‘no’ to either of them, it’s not.
Stop listening to the talking heads with red faces and halitosis who shout their investment/financial strategies at you via cable TV. They don’t know you or your goals. If they want to watch the price of yak milk in southern Sri Lanka to determine whether the Swiss Franc will hold up to the deflationary pressure in the Argentinian gold bullion market, thus spiking land values in the least of the Lesser Antilles, creating a flood of American ex-pat migration, leading to a glut in the US housing supply that crashes the national median sales price by $5000, let them. Doesn’t mean you need to join them on that hamster wheel.
Geraldine sat back from her keyboard, grinning as she laced her fingers behind her head.
“You still go it,” she congratulated herself on another job well done, her smoker’s rasp yielding to a brief coughing fit. She fished the last cigarette out of the pack of Virginia Slims on the desk next to the old Toshiba laptop with an arthritic claw. Everything took longer these days, but that only added to the eventual satisfaction.
Lighting up, she proofed her ad copy for the fourth time through the cancerous haze. She chuckled at her favorite bits, like the proud parent of puns and witticisms that she was.
More upgrades than a Kardashian! More remodeling than a Jenner!
Don’t take these counter tops for granite!
Even the pronoun police agree that Mrs. Clean lives here!
Despite having written hundreds of property descriptions over the years, the one thing Geraldine prided herself on above all else was that no two were exactly the same. She agonized over every noun. Scrutinized every verb. Relished every adjective. While there may be only so many ways to describe a swimming pool, or a great room, by God she would find a new combination of words every time. Even if it just meant tweaking timeless cliches ever so slightly.
This was what she brought to the table. This was why her clients hired her. It was right there on her business card, after all:
“Geraldine Jurgenson – The House Poet“
The cursor was still flashing on the screen, insistent. It drew her grey eye to the call to action just beneath her text:
Improve with AI
Geraldine scoffed, as she always had since artificial intelligence entered her profession in recent months. Not for the first time, she wondered what illiterate boob of an agent would outsource her very words to R2D2. The world had become a very strange place since Reagan left office.
And yet … she couldn’t deny the morbid curiosity that flooded her doubting mind.
What does a machine know about selling a house?
What computer code can tug at a home buyer’s emotions like my prose?
She saved what she had written, took a long swig of Diet Pepsi through a turtle-killing bendy plastic straw, and pressed the button allowing for artificial “enhancement” of her property description. This would be good for a laugh.
“Okay, Data, show me what you got,” she smirked, pleased with her reference.
No sooner had she finished her sentence did the lengthy paragraphs on the screen rearrange themselves into shorter blurbs. Despite herself, she had to admit that the new layout was more approachable and easier on the eye than her wall of text.
Parlor trick, she told herself. Of course a computer would structure everything just right. She did use spellcheck and grammarcheck, after all. She shouldn’t be surprised that maximum efficiency was a check in the robot’s column. A useful syntax tool, nothing more.
Fair play, Mr.Roboto, but now let’s see how you do with the actual art of writing.
She comforted herself with the certainty that the glorified Roomba’s words would have all the flow of her late husband’s prostate.
Her smile faded as she read through the opening lines, however. It disappeared entirely when she moved on to the second paragraph. By the time she read through the conclusion, she was physically shaking and near tears.
It was beautiful. Captivating even. The details. The descriptions. The robot’s version was so much more concise and impactful than hers, despite being confined to the same 1000 character limit.
She had never before seen a walk-in pantry described as ” a magical wardrobe to culinary Narnia.” Nor had she ever considered opening a line dedicated to a home’s hardwood flooring with, “Well, shiver me timbers!” Every nuanced phrase was as fresh and unique as her old rote was tired and hackneyed.
It made her want to buy the house. And she hated this house.
She could scarcely believe it. Just like that, the niche she had dedicated decades to carving out for herself had been filled in by the lifeless fever dream of some computer geek in Northern California.
If AI was the latest and greatest trend, Geraldine realized that she had become the handyman special, in need of a total makeover. With her osteoporosis, she couldn’t even make the claim to good bones anymore.
She had seen the future, and octogenarian agents like herself certainly weren’t it. All the selfie filters in the world couldn’t obscure that fact.
“Well, old gal,” she announced to the room as she powered off the laptop and stood. “There is always a market for a fixer-upper.”
She made a mental note to reduce her fee and order new business cards as she shuffled out of the cramped, smoke-filled room.
“Alexa, turn off the lights,” she croaked over her bony shoulder, plunging the old cottage into darkness. “The party’s over.”
“I’m not saying they are flying low. I’m just saying the last one took about two inches off the top.”
