Managing Directors, Those Bored and Successful, My Wife and Children, My Mother Who Reads These Posts, and my Fellow Lake Geneva Admirers:
We meet electronically this morning at a moment of unlimited potential. As we begin a new year, I sit here ready to work with you to achieve historic breakthroughs for your family, that prized collection of individuals who count on you to ignite their weekend, lakeside dreams. Our fellow Midwesterners are watching us now, hoping that we will not vacation as two parties, some seeking solace on these shimmering shores, and others still wandering blindly towards a great big, unusable lake in a lesser Eastern state, but as one Nation, united in the desire to spend weekends splashing and playing. The contrast I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda, not an agenda for those in Winnetka and another for those in Hinsdale. It is the agenda of the American people, those who have come here, weary of their work and seeking rest.
There is a new opportunity in American vacation homes, if only we have the courage to seize it. Victory is not winning the bid. Victory is winning the bid on the right house, on the right lake, at the right price. This year, we will recognize an important anniversary that shows us the majesty of this great Lake Geneva mission. This year, we mark 23 years since the start of what I would call a most illustrious Real Estate career. Should I have gone to college and law school? Of course I should have, but that doesn’t matter now. It’s too late to worry about that when the promise of summer is so near.
Today, a mother from Buffalo Grove will log on to her computer, and she’ll stumble upon this website and her eyes will be opened to the possibility of a Lake Geneva vacation home. This is the promise of America, yes, but it’s the further promise of Lake Geneva. And when this mother searches and strives and brings her family to the lake this summer, and oh so many summers after, this is when the dream of my father, and of her father will have been realized. Of course, that assumes her father dreamt of this in the way that my father did, but still. It’s in these people, the city worker and the mother from Buffalo Grove and my father and her father that combine to make the state of the Lake Geneva market strong.
The results of this work, of the street plower dutifully fulfilling his pledge, and of the mother looking and then buying the most perfect lake house, is that our market has never been stronger. We have never been stronger. We own the Midwest vacation home market, and it is all but assured that the coming year will be as bright as the years that preceded it. No, brighter, as if that could be possible. We do not shut off our lights, or turn away any weary travelers just because we are content in our own strength, proud of our resilience and upper bracket liquidity. Instead we offer benevolence to the lake weary, to those who toil and labor in cities and in suburbs, and we offer them shelter because that is what we do and this is who we are. How can we call ourselves Americans if we do not encourage those with the means to lay down roots near our shores? The only wall that Lake Geneva needs is made of Hydrangea, and it blooms as bright as the faces of our sun-kissed children.
The question for us today is actually only for you. It is not for you if you’re content with your vacation home ownership here. If you splash your way through every summer, this is not a charge that you need to consider because you have already passed this greatest test. The question today is for those who sit at their computers, who sit on their couches, who spend Saturday wondering what Sunday will bring even though you know it just brings a long line and then brunch. Maybe a stroller ride through an insufferable park. The question is what, exactly, are you doing? Why are you allowing a most un-American complacency to drag down your weekends, when you know that we’re here- the city worker, polishing the streets that we’d like you to drive over, and the mother, picking up corn at the farmer’s market in the morning to cook it lakeside in the evening. We are here, working and playing and living in a most amazing fashion, even while you sit there in that same new chair, obstructing your own path in life simply because you’re scared to venture into the unknown. Do you not dream our same watery dreams? Do you not wish for your own American dream?
But this isn’t the unknown, my friends, this is America, yes, the most pure version of it. This is America, if the entirety of it would be washed in clean water, surrounded by a lush green shore, where every family gets a boat in every slip and some gas in that boat and a few hours of leisure. This is what we offer, and in the coming months you must make a decision to join us or forever get out of our way. In God We Trust, yes but do we not also trust in blue water and soft summer skies? Do we not trust in weekends that are different than weekdays? In summer that is different than fall? We can make progress this year, together, but we cannot do this without your cooperation. We can lead you to the water but we cannot make you swim. We cannot simply urge you to join us if you will not make even a modest effort. This isn’t what it is to be an American, to lie and lounge in city apartments and in suburban backyards, this isn’t the sense of adventure that our fore-bearers wished for us. Do you not aspire to join us in our greatness?
But today is for the laborer. The partner and the founder. The director and the vice president. They rise and they work, and they rise and they work. They wake on Saturday and they pretend that this day is somehow different. They rise and think that a Lake Geneva vacation home isn’t for them, because it hasn’t ever been for them. That this dream is unattainable. They huddle in their darkest corners, holding tight to their money that they’ve worked so hard to earn, and they fear the things that might happen if they let some of it go. They live as though their pedigree is in question, as though they cannot consider Lake Geneva because of its long enduring reputation as a place for the very best among us. I assure you today, as I will assure you again tomorrow, that Lake Geneva is for everyone, for every man, woman and child, for anyone who wakes on a Saturday and says, “I’m bored, let’s go to the lake”.
And so I make this decree, by executive order, under the authority bestowed upon me by myself, I hereby demand every vacation home seeker of some means to at least consider a Lake Geneva vacation home. Your complacency cannot thrive under this bright lakeside sun, and so this command today by me, your market leading agent, shall be followed otherwise the willing dissenters risk being labeled enemy combatants and foist into the darkness of a Pure Michigan weekend. We may disagree on the course of value, or on the benefits of one shore over the other, or on which restaurant is worthy of our breakfasting intentions and which restaurants are not, but we can agree that Lake Geneva is the place to be. In fact, it always has been, and it always will be. If we can summon the courage to live in a way that finds our weekends at the lake, then we can achieve a new standard of living for the twenty-first century and beyond. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless Lake Geneva and no place else.