Logan Township: Land of low taxes, thanks to Pureland Industrial Complex

One in a continuing series spotlighting the real estate market in this region's communities.

A right turn off Interstate 295's Exit 10 explains why Logan Township has the lowest property taxes around.

Down Center Square Road, as far as the eye can see, is the Pureland Industrial Complex, 3,000 acres of warehouses and light industry that contribute mightily to the township's coffers.

The complex is far from finished, too. Even on a day peppered by snow showers, work continued on the 70,000-square-foot facility that Albert's Organics is building in the Dermody Properties' LogistiCenter at Logan, at 1155 Commerce Blvd.

Enterprises such as this help keep the average property-tax bill in Logan at $3,602.

The township even breaks it down for you by the week: $6.82 for Logan, about $23 for Gloucester County, $39.23 to the schools, and 20 cents toward acquiring local open space.

"My property-tax estimate for 2013 is down $500 from last year after the reassessment we just had," says David Marcantuno, a local resident and real estate agent with Century 21 Alliance.

"Take the exact same house out of Logan and drop it off in Woolwich, or almost anywhere in New Jersey, and the taxes go up 80 percent," Marcantuno says. "No exaggeration."

Dan Ruggieri, who grew up in Logan's Bridgeport neighborhood, is a union pipe fitter who buys, rehabs, and flips houses in the township and in Gibbstown.

"I just finished a house on Hendrickson Mill Road I bought a year ago when the owner died," Ruggieri says. "I'm listing the house at $159,900. The taxes on the house are $1,600. In Woolwich, they'd be $17,000."

"Pureland is the reason why, without any doubt," he says, adding that low taxes and the school district are reasons "families here tend to stay put."

The median price of a single-family house in Logan Township is $184,900, down about 11 percent from a year ago, according to Movoto.com, but the number of properties for sale also is down 21 percent from 2012.

Prices start in the mid-$100,000s and go as high as the $350,000s for new construction, says Jessica Johnson, an agent for Century 21 Alliance.

People also choose Logan Township because of its convenience to highways and the Commodore Barry Bridge into Pennsylvania, Johnson says. The rural nature of the area also allows buyers to qualify for 100 percent financing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Many newcomers to Logan move from other parts of Gloucester County, as well as from Delaware County across the bridge.

First-time homeowner Damon Houchins, 23, settled on a townhouse in the Country Crossing development in early February, attracted, he says, by the low taxes, the home values, the 1.8-mile drive to his job and - looking toward the future - a school district with a good reputation.

"The price was good, and the house was fairly new," says Houchins, who had been living in Deptford, where he grew up. He'd spent more than a year hunting and had looked at 70 houses - "all of them with issues" - until he found the right one.

John Schmidt moved his family, and his heating and air-conditioning business, to Logan from Folsom, Delaware County, a few years ago.

"The hustle and bustle all around us was beginning to get to us," Schmidt says. "We had a small home and a child about 5, and then we found that we were having twins and outgrew the house quickly."

Logan was convenient to his customers on the Pennsylvania side, but it also allowed him to expand his business to New Jersey.

"The schools and the low taxes were enticing," says Schmidt, whose bill, at $4,500 a year, is almost $6,000 lower than it would be in adjacent Woolwich Township.

Compared with the postage-stamp-size municipalities that dot much of South Jersey, Logan - at slightly more than 26 square miles, four of them creeks and marshland - is huge. It contains unincorporated places, each with an identity:

Beckett, between Interstate 295 and the Woolwich border, is where most of the population (about 4,800 people) lives, in developments built between 1980 and the late 1990s that surround a center of shopping strips and other retail spaces. Home building hasn't stopped here, though it slowed during the economic downturn. Orleans Homes, for example, is in Beckett with Hidden Creek, a 58-lot subdivision along Beckett Road, whose houses start at $287,990.

Bridgeport, several streets' worth of older houses and township buildings, is what you see below as you cross Route 322 toward the Commodore Barry Bridge, with 700 people and its own zip code.

Repaupo, primarily farmland, is on Route 130 north of Bridgeport.

Nortonville is near Route 130 and County Road 620.

If you drive down past the Pureland complex and see the brick Union United Methodist Church, built in 1852, that's Center Square.

Because most of Logan Township shares a zip code with Swedesboro and Woolwich, many businesses use Swedesboro as their address - something a lot of people here don't cotton to.

As a resident wrote to a local newspaper, Logan Township "doesn't even touch" the Swedesboro border.