The Charm of Chatham Real Estate

About twenty five years ago, I was told to "go on up there and buy a house." That was one of my partners in our Connecticut advertising agency telling me about the wisdom of buying on Cape Cod during the early and mid eighties before prices started to climb to the upper reaches of anything affordable to us at that time. "Besides," he said "Uncle Sam will help you pay for about half of it." He was referring, of course to the fact that mortgage payments and certain expenses incurred on an investment property would be tax deductible. So we did! We headed to the Cape one long weekend in April. But where to look and where to buy?

Back then my wife and I had a fair amount of experience with the Cape, both having spent many summers somewhere on the Cape in our younger years. And her college roommate had spent her youth in Wellfleet and now lived in Orleans where we visited her many times. We contacted a Realtor friend in Orleans and set a budget and started looking on a Saturday morning. We went from Chatham to Wellfleet, and really didn't have any preconceived prejudices. There were no clear favorites among the towns we looked at. Within the next three days we had looked at close to twenty houses and some building lots, made an offer on the very first house we looked at in Chatham and had that offer accepted by the owner.

This isn't an article about the search and purchase; it's about the real estate we bought and the town we ended up in.....thanks to that thing in life that everybody needs a little bit of.....dumb luck. Back twenty five years ago we thought we had exactly what we were looking for; an affordable second home in a nice town on the Cape. Since then we've learned an awful lot about Cape Cod and a lot more about Chatham. Since then we've used that house as a second home and enjoyed it immensely. We even rented it out to some friends, but wanted it available for ourselves whenever we wanted to "escape to the Cape."

After only four years of owning a second home in Chatham, we made that our primary residence. We were fortunate enough to sell out home in Connecticut before prices started to drop like a rock in 1989. All of a sudden we were Cape "washashores." And we were in a town where we didn't really have any roots. We started to explore the Cape and get to know our town. That first summer we started to spread our wings. The entire reach of Cape Cod was our playground and we explored all the way from the bridges to Provincetown. Then after that first summer we started a business and really began to learn about our chosen town. It was primarily a second home town with a lot of old timers and a lot of retirees. The real estate values were holding up a little better than the neighboring towns when prices began to fall in the late eighties and early nineties. Then we became involved in the local Chamber of Commerce. That's when we really learned that we'd ended up in a little gem of a town.

Involvement with the Chamber of Commerce gave us the "insider" feeling of what the town was all about. The activities were all there if you wanted to take advantage of them. The stories about the Cape being a graveyard after Labor Day were soon refuted. Social life was there for the taking if we could maintain the energy levels needed to keep up with the natives. Year-round golf, only a dream in the interior of Connecticut where courses closed by Thanksgiving and didn't reopen until April first if there wasn't too much snow, became a reality. For the first ten years we lived in Chatham, and while I was keeping track of such things, I played golf in every month of every year.

With water to the South, East and North and a dozen or so fresh water lakes, Chatham is a boater's paradise. Ice fishing was out of the question because the ice on those lakes wouldn't ever be thick enough or stay frozen long enough to support anyone walking out to the middle. But the natives would tell us about the time when Stage Harbor froze over and you could walk out to the spit of sand that was Harding's Beach. But warmer weather activities were the main attraction for us, and they were plentiful. Beaching, an occasional sail and the wonderful Cape Cod golf courses were our biggest rewards.

Real estate was an important factor in our lives, and the appreciation we experienced in the house we bought allowed us to eventually "trade up." There was the additional investment property that we bought and rented for a few years, but then didn't want to be landlords with the associated problems, so that was a short, but profitable venture.

But the town of Chatham itself was what made the last twenty five years the most enjoyable we could have imagined. Plenty of great restaurants, although we usually end up in what have become our favorites. Theatre, both year round and during the summer, was a wonderment. It wasn't Broadway, or even off-Broadway, but it was ours. And it was only about ten minutes away. And of course, there are the golf courses. Since living on the Cape, there isn't one course that I haven't played. Fortunate enough to meet people who were members of some fabulous private clubs, I've had an enviable couple of decades of great golf.

If you're interested in a second home location, or a place to really settle down as your final destination after years of hard labor, you should consider Chatham, right at the elbow of Cape Cod.