In between discussing the merits of cutting fish free without first twisting their stomachs into knots and researching the shortcomings of other area lakes (ponds), there is something that I hope you’ve noticed by reading along here. Our market is absolutely on fire. It is. Other agents say this, which is fine. But they tend to say this at all times, when things are good and when things are bad they are still, according to this boring narrative, breathlessly on fire. That’s hopefully why you’re reading along today, and why you’re working with me, or that’s even why you’re reading along today and making the horrible, ancestry shaming mistake of still working with someone else. You’re doing this because I write the truth about the market, even if there are huge doses of hyperbole and equal amounts of sarcasm that you must first wade through before finding the details.
The market, it’s hot. Very hot. Like, I can’t remember it being this hot in 2006, hot. There are buyers in every market segment, excepting perhaps motivated buyers in the lakefront condo market. Even the Abbey Villas have found footing of late, with several sales including two that I’m in the process of brokering. And that’s me, and I hardly ever sell in the Villas. The lake access market is bustling, with plenty of contracts flying across the interwebs, and just this week I have a new contract pending in Cedar Point Park and another lake access property closed at the Lake Geneva Club. To note, that Lake Geneva Club cottage that I just sold (the one up there) closed for $525k to a lucky buyer from the North Shore, and as we’re always looking for small lessons in each transaction, the lesson of this sale is simple: Super cute cottages with hardwood floors and fireplaces and double lots and boatslips on great streets are always going to attract motivated buyers. Always and forever.
A few more lake access homes sold in the past week as well. One in Country Club Estates for $535k, a fun house quite a distance from the lake, but a nice house at a nice house to be certain. A home in Cedar Point Park sold in the upper $200k range, and a home that was listed improperly in our MLS but sold anyway in the Birches for $312k. As a side note, someone also paid $1.55MM for a home on Lake Beulah, which means that somewhere, an angel had their wings forcibly removed without any local anesthesia. These Geneva sales are fabulous for the market, but two sales from last week stand alone as being the absolute most significant.
In either a sign of the pending apocalypse or just a sign of a red hot market, the large awkward home in Loramoor has finally, mercifully sold. If you were to have glanced at the market at any point over the past six or ten years, you very well may have seen this massive albatross listed for sale. The home was large, with a pool and a boatslip and all sorts of amazing features. It was approximately seven million square feet in size, and that was the problem. What to do with a house of such enormous proportions? Most buyers over the years had no use for that much money sucking space, and so the home sat on the market through many, many pricing gyrations. This past week the home sold, and I can’t say that at $800k that I don’t think it was a great deal. Heck, I might have bought it had I been able to turn the East wing of the home into some sort of Hostel. With this sale, there is now proof that this recovery has extended to the most forgotten of our vacation home inventory, and in that, I suppose, our recovery is complete and now we can all go home.
Another sale, this one lakefront, poses some interesting questions and relieves the market from a potential trouble spot. The great big home on Conference Point, facing East, that had been listed for more than a year in the $5MM+ range, has closed for $4.4MM. The cash buyer purchased the home this week, and it’s a wonderful sale for our market. It matters because while the home is nice, the location was not one that most of us thought all that much of. Traditionally, if a buyer wants to spend $4.4MM, she’ll do so in a spot that has historically supported such value. Perhaps the North Shore of the lake between Cedar Point and Knollwood, or perhaps somewhere off of Snake Road, or Basswood, or South Lakeshore Drive- either the Lake Geneva or the Fontana variety. This sale does show that buyers will still pay handsomely for fine quality finishes, and this home, while somewhat boring on the exterior, was indeed outfitted beautifully on the interior.
There’s another discussion for this home, and that relates to its proximity to Pier 290. This Pier 290 thing seems to indeed be a thing, and the popularity of the place is increasing weekly. While I wish the food would elevate beyond its current level, the restaurant is undeniably beautiful and the setting equally so. There is little not to like about this place, but it may not be the sort of operation that you’d like to live too terribly close to. The home that just sold is somewhere around 600′ away from the restaurant, which sounds like a lot until you’re sleeping with your windows open on a Saturday night with a slight north breeze. At that point, it’s close, and the market has yet to show any flight from, or rush towards, Pier 290.
The sale at $4.4MM provides a nice benchmark for those out there who own luxury homes on luxury lots. If a buyer will pay $4.4MM to be in this location, there are buyers who will pay $5MM for similar homes in better areas. There are high end buyers out there at the moment, and I expect if the stock markets remain in their current range, the fall market should be nothing short of spectacular. There have been 16 lakefront sales YTD, and at least three more are pending sale now. The market is active, to say the absolute least.