Tammy and Michael Stokes listed their 35-acre horse property in Effort for sale May 4.

A little more than a month later, they had a signed contract for the property, which includes a 40-stall barn, an indoor arena, lots of fenced pasture and a cozy 2,000-square-foot home.

"Everything happened so fast," says Tammy, a native of Raubsville, who owned the home and horse-boarding and training business for seven years. "We had four different people here in five weeks, and two actually made offers." That the horse property not only sold quickly but also for very close to its asking price of $735,000 did not surprise, Loren Keim , broker-owner of Century 21 Keim in Allentown, the listing agent.

Horse properties in eastern Pennsylvania, especially Monroe, Lehigh, Northampton and Berks counties, are in great demand, and, when properly marketed, don't last long, Keim says.

Gary Coles, broker-owner of New Pennsylvania Realty in New Ringgold, has been selling dairy, beef, Christmas tree, agricultural and horse farms in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, for 30 years. He also is seeing the trend.

"Interest in farms, especially horse farms, is definitely on the rise," says Coles, who besides selling equine real estate, shows horses.

As owner of the Germansville Feed & Farm Supply in Germansville and former member of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, Rodney Schlauch has noticed it, too.

"The number of horse farms in the area has been growing for a number of years, the last couple of years in particular," he says.

Experts attribute this growing interest in the area for equine estates to several factors.

One is the exodus of horse owners from New York that has escalated since Sept. 11.

"A number of people who are in the horse business in the New York area are leaving and they're coming in this direction," says Keim, who while in real estate since 1986, started saddling up to horse owners about three years ago.

"As they come east, they're hitting a couple of points along the extreme Pennsylvania border. One is in the Stroudsburg area because it's close to I-80. The other is Upper Bucks County."

Upper Bucks County is convenient to racetracks in Philadelphia and New York. "But it's more expensive than Lehigh, Northampton and Berks counties, which is why more horse owners are moving out this way," Keim says.

Just as with traditional residential real estate, Keim says, those who are fleeing New York "can end up in New Jersey and pay a much higher price or they can come a little farther into Pennsylvania and pay a more reasonable price and lower taxes."

Coles, too, has seen an influx of buyers from the New York area since the World Trade Center crumbled from terrorist attacks.

"In my 28 years prior to 9-11, I sold to one to two people from Long Island," he says. "In the last two years, I've sold to 15 people who have moved out here from within a 20-mile proximity of New York City. Before 9-11, we rarely got people from New York. Now half the people I show properties to are from the New York area."

Coles says he finds that horse owners also are being chased from Chester, Lower Bucks and Montgomery counties by development.

"They're getting totally encroached by subdivisions and traffic, and it's not a friendly environment for horses," says Coles, who also sells farmland for development. "So they're coming up here to Lehigh, Carbon and Schuylkill counties where they still can find more rural properties."

The move afoot in Harrisburg to allow slot machines at racetracks in Pennsylvania also has affected the area's horse-suitable real estate, Keim says.

In the last few years, Keim has fielded an increasing number of calls from thoroughbred owners across the country.

"People in the thoroughbred market are anticipating that Pennsylvania is going to allow slot [machines] at racetracks and that's going to increase the purse sizes on horse racing in Pennsylvania," Keim says. "They anticipate that the increased purse sizes will help bring much of the horse racing back here from the South. As a result, we've had a lot of enquiries from Tennessee and from Florida and from Kentucky, where people may own multiple facilities."

Keim says he noticed the interest in properties for thoroughbreds start to rise during the race for governor in 2002, when both candidates, Democrat Ed Rendell and Republican Mike Fisher, said they would sign gaming legislation.Those in the horse racing business "were kind of expecting it," Keim says. "They figured, no matter who won [the election], it would take effect, and are trying to stay ahead."

At Gov. Rendell's urging, a bill allowing slots gambling at nine racetracks and one slot parlor each in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed the House in July, but was buried by the Senate. Proponents of the bill said they would start again with the hope of having a bill before the legislature in the fall.

Yet another reason horse properties are hot is that owning horses has became a very popular pastime again. "It seems, at least to me," Keim says, "that more and more people are getting a family horse or hobby horse for their kids and need a place to keep them."

Because so many people have horses, boarding has become a lucrative business, Keim says.

The Stokes are only selling their boarding and training facility in Monroe County because they want to cut back. They are moving to Virginia, to a smaller facility, Tammy says. They're also taking their saddle business, Centaur Saddlery, with them.

Because of the strong demand and short supply, prices for horse properties are escalating. However, Keim can't say by how much as he doesn't keep statistics that way.

However, he says, people who are buying farmland to house their horses are likely to pay more per acre than those buying it to build homes. Developers need to keep acre prices low because the cost of developing land is astronomical, Keim says. In this area, a developer typically looks to spend no more than $8,000 an acre, where someone who wants to keep the land for horses and a home may be willing to pay as much as $10,000 an acre.

Keim typically works on selling about 15 horse properties at a time. Last year, the horse properties Keim sold ranged from about from $350,000 to $2.5 million. As with residential properties, the price depends on location, facilities and size.

Most horse owners looking from properties in this area spend between $500,000 and $750,000, Keim says.

A typical buyer of a horse property wants a 2,800-square foot home and a barn on at least 10 acres, Keim says.

"It's not that they necessarily need 10 acres, but there are tax breaks if they buy at least 10 acres," he explains. "If you have 10 acres, the laws allow you to base the real estate taxes on the house and 1 acre of land and, so basically, you're not paying much, if anything, for the rest There's an incentive to buy a larger parcel. It probably costs you more in taxes to own 6 acres versus a 12-acre farm."

Keim sells existing horse properties as well as untouched land that can be made into horse farms.

The latter is how he helped Sandy Piscitello about two years ago when Piscitello, an information technology director, accepted a job with Merck & Co.

Piscitello needed a home and property that would not only be convenient to the two Merck sites where he works -- the West Point plant and Whitehouse Station, N.J., headquarters -- but also that would house his wife's 18 Arabian horses, which she breeds and sells.

From his home in Cincinnati, Piscitello did a Google search on the Internet for horse properties in Eastern Pennsylvania and discovered Keim and his Web sites that listed horse properties for sale. He contacted Keim who showed him a number of options on the market from the Reading to the Easton areas.

"The problem was, if they had a lot of land, they usually had an old rundown bank barn with a sagging roof. And if the barn was nice, then the farmhouse was old and needed updating," says Piscitello, who was under the gun. He had sold his home in Ohio in 10 days, and he, his wife, their two teenage sons and the horses needed to be out by Jan. 15, 2002.

Keim located an undeveloped 30-acre property in Lehigh Township where Piscitello could build a barn with stalls for the horses and a 2,600-square-foot home for the family.

Getting the building permits from the township turned out to be a lot more difficult than Piscitello anticipated, but he, his wife, Denise, sons and the horses moved in a year ago this month.

"I'm glad we ended up doing it the way we did," Piscitello says, "because everything came out nice. And with the demand that there is out there for horse properties, it's been a good investment as well."

Beth W. Orenstein is a freelance writer.