Moving to the Myrtle Beach area? That ‘waterfront’ home might not be what you think.

When Barbara Runion and her husband moved from the Washington D.C. suburbs to Carolina Forest several years ago, they were surprised by one of the up-charges on their new home: A $6,500 premium because their backyard bordered a small pond.

Runion was surprised, she said, because their slice of the “water view” they were sold was only a narrow slice, and the pond as a whole wasn’t large enough to attract the kinds of birds and wildlife they’ll leave home to seek out.

“I could almost do a running jump across the pond to the other side,” Runion said. “We like to bird watch, we like to go out and look at nature (but) there are no birds here, and the water quality is pretty bad. It’s not the kind of lake that’s going to attract birds that people might enjoy.”

Still, though, they paid the premium, which their realtor said could soon jump to $10,000.

What Runion didn’t know, though, is that she had paid that premium to live adjacent to a stormwater retention pond, a small man-made pond that serves a dual purpose of providing fill dirt to raise homes and roads above flood levels, and helps stormwater drain from the neighborhood. In part because the county is so flat, Horry County mandates that builders reduce stormwater runoff from a particular parcel when they build there. Ponds are a common way developers comply with those rules.

But some residents, like Runion, feel like they weren’t told the full truth about their neighborhoods when they were moving in.

“We’re not rich, my husband worked for the federal government,” Runion said. “We really didn’t have $6,500 to piss away on a cesspool, a little retention pond. That always kind of bugged me.”

As Horry County continues to grow — adding thousands of new residents and homes each year — some residents, both those who moved here recently and those who have lived here their whole lives, are beginning to raise concerns about the ways new homes and subdivisions are built. Already, advocacy groups like Horry County Rising have raised concerns about the “fill and build” technique of home construction, in which clay and other dirt is mined, transported and used to raise the base of a home. Some residents have complained that such a method pushes stormwater runoff onto neighboring properties and other places where it didn’t used to flow before.

Other residents have taken issue with the rapid pace of development as a whole, and county council members have said they’re considering a moratorium on rezoning land along the Highway 90 corridor, one area that’s seen thousands of new homes in recent years and is slated to see thousands more in the near future.

At a recent community meeting at the Tilly Swamp Baptist Church, which focused mostly on growth and development concerns along Highway 90, resident Mary Anders questioned why the rapid building was being sold to newcomers as “lakefront” property.

“We have realtors who list homes for sale in our development as “lakefronts” and I want to know, where is the lake?” she asked, with members of the audience laughing and clapping in response. “They’re retention ponds.”

In an interview with The Sun News, Anders said she had considered buying a second home in her Rivers Edge Plantation neighborhood to fix up and resell, and laughed when she realized that realtors were listing homes near a retention pond as “lakefront.”

“I grew up in the country, I know the difference between a lake, a river, a pond and a stream,” Anders said. “I just think that’s false advertising when a realtor does that.”

Why Horry County has so many retention ponds

Whether you’ve lived in Horry County your whole life or you’ve only moved here recently, you’ve probably stumbled across this fact at one point or another: Horry County is incredibly flat.

That means county waterways — like the Waccamaw River and the Intracoastal Waterway — move slowly as they meander from North to South.

And when it rains or storms, the low-elevation and slow-moving waterways mean stormwaters can take days to fully recede.

So, as Horry County has grown and added new residents and houses, the county began mandating that that builders control the stormwater flowing off of a piece of land as they build. In large subdivisions, that often takes shape as stormwater retention ponds, which are specially designed to help control flooding. In some cases, developers will dig out the ponds and use the dirt as “fill” to raise the base of a home up higher. In other cases, miners collect the clay and sand from large areas and later sell the land to home builders, who then fill the former mines with water and turn them into ponds.

For developers that do everything from site work to home construction under one entity, it’s a profitable arrangement: The fill dirt from the mines raises homes to meet county regulations, and the hole left behind can be used to meet stormwater regulations, and raise the price of a new home.

In other cases, developers purchase land that was formerly used as a sand, dirt and clay mine — those materials help build new roads, among other uses — fill the hole in, and build homes around it. One mine operator told The Sun News previously that he planned to dig a large sand and clay mine in the Western part of the county, then turn the mine into a lake and build several homes around it.

And some residents say being able to live near a pond, even a man-made one, is worth the cost.

Michael Ritchie lives in The Farm in Carolina Forest, works for a home builder and said he paid a $9,000 premium for his home near a large retention pond. Though he grew up near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, he said he loves living near the pond he does now and enjoys watching the turtles, ducks and geese.

“I always knew I wanted to be near water, it’s calming,” he said. “I like water. To me, I’ve always been a water baby.”

Ritchie said he also sees residents concerns that the marketing of pond-adjacent homes as waterfront may give people the wrong idea, and said labeling properties in Horry County as “lake front” “is a little much.”

“I can see when people come from somewhere else and they’re not used to it. If you market waterfront up (North) you’re probably on a river or the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “But when agents are marketing waterfront, it is waterfront, and the ponds are kept up quite nicely.”

Ronald Tagliabue, another resident in The Farm, said when he moved to Carolina Forest 16 years ago, his realtor “found one reason or another to put a price on everything” and called the retention pond they live near a “lake.” He noted that realtors ought to be more up front about what the ponds are, and what function they serve, in part because the water in the ponds contains runoff and may not be very clean for recreation or wildlife.

“They never used the word retention pond, they called it a lake,” he said. “That was a big selling point that you were on the water. They didn’t do anything illegal but they didn’t tell you what it was for.”

A marketing problem?

Asked about the way that realtors market homes near retention ponds, Laura Crowther, the CEO of the Coastal Carolina Association of Realtors said part of the issue is the database realtors use when they list a home for sale.

The CCAR, she said, runs a regional Multiple Listing Service — a large database of homes that are for sale at a given point in time — and the database only has certain options for sellers to select when a home is near water of some kind. While those options include “lake/pond,” “lake/pond view” and “on lake/pond,” Crowther said the MLS doesn’t have a way for realtors to distinguish between man-made lakes and ponds, stormwater ponds or natural lakes and ponds.

“You’re somewhat limited in the use of the MLS with the fields, you can only put in so many fields to define what a property is. That is somewhat of a limitation in the MLS,” Crowther said. “Some things you have to have write in a description or talk to an agent about.”

Still, she said, any type of pond or water feature, even man-made stormwater ponds, are considered an amenity, and a positive feature that some people will seek out. And housing market forces dictate whether sellers charge a premium for a pond-adjacent home, she said. If the charge was too high, or inappropriate altogether, people wouldn’t buy the homes, she said. It’s “supply and demand,” Crowther said.

“(Buying a home near a pond is) an individual choice that folks make and obviously if they purchased it and it was what they decided on outside of all the properties then I would say they made the decision that it was worth it,” she said. “It goes back to personal choice.”

In the event that a buyer feels like a realtor misled them, Crowther said the CCAR has a professional standards committee that assesses complaints and can issue fines. South Carolina’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation also has a Real Estate Commission that adjudicates complaints against realtors and in some cases can revoke a person’s license.

However, Holly Beeson, a spokesperson for the LLR, said in an email this week the commission had not heard of any issues relating to stormwater ponds.

At the local level, Hunter Platt, a senior advisor for the real estate company Tradd Commercial and the chairman of Horry County Planning Commission, said he hasn’t heard complaints about the way stormwater ponds are marketed, and noted that even if buyers don’t know the function of the ponds they still count as water features.

He said he was surprised to hear that some residents believe stormwater ponds were falsely advertised.

“That’s the first I’ve ever heard it’s false advertising and I don’t know what the county could do to regulate that,” he said. “To me, everyone has a moral compass. I like to sleep at night so I just tell people everything, here’s all the good stuff here’s all the bad stuff.”

He added: “I can see where they charge a premium. At the end of the day it’s about profit, like any other business. Personally, would I pay a premium for a pond.”

Frustrated residents

Even though residents may enjoy living near a stormwater pond, some said they would have liked more information up front about what specifically they were buying. Plus, some said, not all stormwater ponds are created equally. Some are well-kept and stocked with fish, fostering a small ecosystem of birds, critters and plants. But others are not maintained as well, and can become overrun with algae. In some Socastee neighborhoods, an invasive species of snail has begun calling stormwater ponds home.

Runion, of Carolina Forest, said that she and her husband may have thought twice about buying their home if they had known the function of the pond in their backyard. To her, it’s an issue that part of the rapid growth and development in the county.

“It’s just anything goes down here. Any way the county wants to build, they’re going to do it, whether it’s filling in wetlands or cutting down trees or adding more traffic,” she said. “It’s all about revenue and taxation.”

Tagliabue, also of Carolina Forest, said it’s “a fine line” that realtors working in Horry County walk when selling the deluge of new homes consistently getting built here.

“It’s a real fine line they walk there,” he said. “I would never want to say they lie but maybe…they misrepresented what the ponds were for.”

This story was originally published July 27, 2021 at 3:30 PM.