The pursuit of a vacation home is a bit of a paradox. It is in full speed fast forward, always scanning what’s there and watching what’s next and wondering what might some day be. It is also a slow slog, a painful crawl through the inventory that never satisfies, through prices that never entice, and through the days and months and years that wear on without end. It is at once a sprint and a marathon, a joy and a pain, something fun and something torturous. Anyone who cannot relate has never given themselves over to the hunt.
A vacation home can fill a recently noticed void. A Saturday spent at the lake can lead to a weekend spent looking for a house which can lead to a purchase. That vacation home purchase, aimed at filling that freshly recognized void, is a wonderful thing. The same can be said for a long standing void in life, though sometimes the vacation home is less a perfect fit and is instead just another toy, object, or collected thing to throw into the deep abyss that can never, ever be filled. To understand this sort of purchase, take a swing around the lake on any given Saturday. You will see lavish homes with people living as they should inside and outside of them. And then you will see homes with perfectly manicured gardens and the brightest of bright work, with no one around to even notice.
A vacation home transaction is generally awash in white noise. Distractions, momentary tensions, the thrill of negotiating and the palpable moments of panic that creep in late at night or in the middle of the afternoon when the purchaser wonders what it is that they are in the process of doing. Deals are complicated, and the narrative of any purchase can involve many snippets of distraction. The story of a vacation home purchase can be a simple short story or a lengthy novel, both comedy or tragedy or generally both at different times. Through all these different sorts of motivations and different sorts of purchases and different sorts of buyers there is one that I prefer: The buyer who has spent most of his or her life longing for a place on the lake.
These buyers are different from nearly all of the others. These buyers were once new to the lake, just as everyone is at some point new to it. But instead of just enjoying the lake to some slight degree, they become immersed in it. They raise children with an eye towards the lake, where weekends are meant for baseball games, yes, but also for racing to the lake after those games to jump on the boat or grab a late dinner, lakeside. These are the people that teach their children to water ski on the lake during early mornings, and then teach them to fish off the pier during late afternoons. These are the people who sleep on old beds in small bedrooms that lack air conditioning not because they must, but because that bedroom is in the house that sits up the road from the lake and that lake doesn’t just mean something to them, it means just about everything.
And these are the buyers that spend their lives working and striving and pining away. They have familiarity with the lake that causes them to focus on one stretch of it. They impose their own restrictions on their search, and the property cannot be this or it can’t be that. They know what they want because they have put in the countless hours circling the lake on boats, and many more walking along its shore. They know the lake better than you do, perhaps better than I do, and they know it because they’ve devoted so much time to it. Once their search begins, after a lifetime spent working and sacrificing, they know what they want and where they want it to be.
Enter the property at 976 South Lakeshore Drive in Fontana. I sold that property last week to a buyer whom I was honored to represent. They paid $2.95MM for 142′ of frontage that just happened to be in the spot on the lake that they most desired. They purchased that home not because it was time for another toy, not just because it was on a lake and not just because it seemed the right time to indulge. They purchased that home last week to serve as the happy culmination of all those years spent searching and wishing and wanting. Every vacation home buyer is important and every purchase is meaningful on some level, but we would all miss the point if we thought that all purchases are created equal. To this buyer, a sincere thank you and congratulations on a life long dream realized.