The American real estate story, as told from the mid 1990s through today, could very easily be told not through lots and lots of words, but simply through reading the closing statements of the homes that I’ve personally bought and sold. My story started in 1997, when I bought a small home on Clover Street in Williams Bay. The story wove through Walworth County, but no farther East than Knollwood and no farther South than Kinzie Street in Fontana. My current house is the westerly boundary of my pursuits, and the northern boundary is Geneva National. I spent plenty of years there, as renter, as owner, as builder, as schemer.
In the summer of one year I bought a two bedroom Fairway condominium in Geneva National. That was as far north as I had previously gone, and to this day that’s still as far north as I ever got. The condo was nice, enough. It looked like the early 1990s, with green this and oak that, plastic counters and square white tiles. The purpose of buying that condo on that day was simply to have a place to find shelter while I built the house on Saratoga that I had planned to call home. I bought the condo for $144k, or maybe it was $146k. It didn’t matter, because the year was 2006 and it was very hard to make a short term housing mistake then. I bought the unit, took down the wallpaper, tiled some bits, put granite where there once was plastic, painted things, changed the mantel, and did the revolutionary thing of the day: Hung a TV on the wall.
A year later, my house was nearing completion, so I put the unit on the market and sold it. It was, literally, that easy. Listed, sold. $188k, as I recall. A tidy profit for my efforts that were rather minimal. The fall that I sold that condo represented the peak of the market at GN. There have been fits and starts since then, spurts of activity that looked as though they would be the start of a market re-born; of a market that had once again found its stride. Since that fall, every sign of recovery has proven a false start. I don’t say that glibly, as I have seen how powerful the market in GN can be, and I see how feeble it is today. Geneva National, no matter how hard it tries, just cannot gain any momentum.
I had a listing in GN earlier this year. The property was nice, and it wasn’t all that expensive. I had showings galore, and one miserable offer that the buyer should have actually been visibly embarrassed to write. I failed to sell that house, just as I failed to sell the last condo I had available there. Earlier this fall, I had a call from a nice owner in GN, and after I bumbled the return of that call for a while, I had to come out and say it: I had no secret formula to sell a house in GN. I had no edge. I had no insight into who the buyer was and how we might find her. I had to level with that seller and simply tell him there is nothing aside from persistence that can sell a property in Geneva National.
Last spring I had an inkling that GN was about to rebound with some serious intent. The spring numbers looked solid, and there was plenty of activity. Interest rates were low, prices were low, and GN, while mired in a market slump, was still looking and acting like a high end resort development. More on that look later, but once the spring of 2013 turned to summer, the market recovery that I thought I saw was nowhere to be found. It was a head fake, nothing else. Consider this: By October 13, 2012 there has been 29 YTD sales. In 2013, the year that I thought started with an obvious bang, there were 49 YTD sales. But this year, this 2014, the year that the rest of the market looks fully recovered, there have been just 32 YTD sales.
Volume isn’t the only way to judge market momentum, as low inventory markets can stall out on volume but still excel in market performance. In high inventory markets, like GN, volume is the best gauge of market strength, and so we must acknowledge that the performance this year is lackluster at best. For all this devil’s advocacy I’m doing, there are some positive signs. Inventory is falling a bit. Prices are still falling, mostly, which means buyers will be forced to pay attention and focused buyers means sales volume. The foreclosures that have been constantly tripping GN are abating, and fewer foreclosures combined with less inventory should allow GN to continue its slow slog towards normalcy.
There are 99 active listings in GN this morning. There are three more pending sale. I continue to believe that GN is the easiest way for a family on a budget to buy and own a vacation home at Lake Geneva. I was showing economical condominiums there last week, and I was a bit surprised at how cheap some of the condo units have become. $150k buys a pretty nice little place, one that I’d be more than pleased to frequent on weekends. For all the difficulties at GN, remember that the development is simply too nice, the terrain too varied, the woods too deep, the scenery too pleasant. Markets change, interest rates will rise, but developments that have unique visual appeal should always find their way back. Some just take far too long.