Town By Town: Schuylkill Township: An improving neighborhood of fast sellers

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

Schuylkill Township is one of those locales people outside Chester County may have trouble placing. Just think of Phoenixville on one side and Valley Forge National Historical Park on the other.

Joseph Scott McArdle has no trouble finding it. The Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Fox & Roach Realtors agent has been listing and selling houses in Schuylkill Township for many years.

"When the Borough of Phoenixville was in its economic decline, a lot of people who lived in Schuylkill Township would obtain a Valley Forge address instead of using their Phoenixville mailing address because of the negative perception," he says.

Since the borough's resurgence began almost 10 years ago, however, McArdle says many people who live in the township "are proud of their association with Phoenixville."

"What a difference a decade makes," he says.

Houses here - many built by major developers starting in the mid- to late 1980s - sell quickly, with 61 days the average time on market for a home in the last 12 months, McArdle says.

Of the 189 houses listed by real estate agents since April 2014, 109 have sold, with an average price of $432,219, he says. The average list price of the houses sold was $526,379, his data show.

During the last 12 months, the lowest sale price on a property was $99,500, while the maximum was $1,215,000, McArdle's data show.

Norman and Betty Vutz have lived here for the last 34 years.

"We had two daughters and there was a third on the way, and the girls were interested in horses," says Norman Vutz, a former township supervisor. "We started looking for somewhere to keep horses that was a little more rural."

The Vutzes landed on 10.2 acres, where they still live. And there are still horses on their property.

"A mother and her daughters have four horses they keep here," he says. "They do the work, and we watch."

But when their daughters were growing up - the eldest is an equine veterinarian - "we cleaned up after the horses," he says with a laugh.

Concerned about development, Vutz ran for the Board of Supervisors early on, won a seat, and recently "stepped aside" after three decades.

"I don't think we really had much control" over development, he says, citing the failure of efforts to mandate installation of sprinklers in new construction.

Over the years, Vutz says, he found that "the cost of development exceeds the tax revenues" new construction generates initially.

Development made Schuylkill Township less rural - Vutz says there are only two or three horse farms left.

"The road department that was just one guy and a dump truck when we moved here" has expanded, he says. There's a new township building and a police department.

"We farm out a lot of the work to keep costs down," with the YMCA handling parks and recreation, for example, and this "keeps us self-sufficient with taxables," he says.

The Phoenixville Area School District has "always been a bone of contention," Betty Vutz says, explaining that many residents who can afford it send their children to private schools that offer access to the colleges they want them to attend.

"Our eldest daughter graduated from Phoenixville High School, but the younger two from Agnes Irwin," she says. "For years, real estate agents told us that we needed to do something to improve the district, but we shared it with the borough and East Pikeland."

Now, Betty Vutz says, "I will say that Phoenixville High School is very much on the upswing, and I have a feeling that they are raising the level of education."

In fact, for the second year, Newsweek placed the high school among the top 1,000 in the nation, which McArdle cites as another of the positives resulting from the reemergence of Phoenixville Borough in the last decade.

Alan Fegley, district superintendent for the last five years, says the school system has adopted "a growth mind-set," believing that "all students can and will succeed, with a firm belief that we can meet the learning needs of all the students."

"We have been expanding in a very difficult economy," Fegley says, starting a Spanish program at the elementary schools that is being expanded this year, for example, and increasing AP course offerings that are now being taken by 48 percent of the high school's students, including 113 freshmen.

The district has partnered with a number of universities and colleges, including Wilkes, Neumann, Rosemont, and Immaculata, which offer college-credit courses either at Phoenixville High or at those campuses, he says.

One measure of district success is the fact that five students are headed for the "Physics World Cup" in Thailand this summer, with Phoenixville the only U.S. high school chosen after several competitions in the United States.

A competition at Phoenixville was used to reduce the number of students from 30 to five, Fegley says.

"They leave for Thailand on June 23 and return on July 4," he says. "We told them the fireworks will be for them."

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