If you’re showing a house on Folly Lane, it’s best to show it in late October. That’s because the skinny road that makes an abrupt turn towards the lake off of Snake Road is lined with Maples. No, not merely lined, it’s choked with Maples. These aren’t your run of the mill Maples with orange and red and all sorts of silly extra colors, these are the yellow Maples. That’s a man’s Maple, the yellow one. And Folly Lane has all of the yellow ones, and as such, you’d be best served to show a house on Folly Lane in late October when these green Maples are brilliantly yellow.
But if you can’t show Folly Lane in October, it’s still a good enough drive any other time of year. I drove down that road last Friday with a cherished client in tow, and later that day we closed on the large lakefront at Folly Lane for $7.4MM. This price, by the way, is the same price the property sold for in 2012 (the furnished number was $300k higher than the recorded print). I didn’t love that sale back then, as the market was in pretty rough shape in the summer of 2012, but today the market is robust and vibrant, especially in our upper reaches. Today, that sale at $7.4MM makes sense to the market, and I was supremely pleased to represent the buyer.
For the market, that’s the sixth sale over $5MM in the last 12 months. Of those six, I’ve closed five of them. That reminds me of something that happened over the weekend. On Saturday morning I was out early delivering magazines with my son. We were walking up to the Lake Geneva Starbucks to peddle our pile of propaganda. A woman was walking out with her husband, a copy of Summer Homes For City People in her hand. She was talking in low, hushed tones to her husband. In a terse whisper she said, “I’m not sure why I’d want to read Dave Curry talking about himself”. I was disheartened to hear this, but I quickly decided that it would be better for me to write 84 pages about myself than about someone else. The waters could get slightly litigious if I wrote 84 pages about someone else. And in the same way, I really don’t like having to tell everyone how I’ve sold five of the last six mega-sales on Geneva Lake, but if I don’t tell you, do you think the other 500 some Realtors here will?
As of this morning, there are six homes for sale on Geneva priced in excess of $5MM. Of those, perhaps four of them are actually worth more than $5MM. Be sure to ask me which ones those are. Of the remaining homes, there’s a rumored offer on one of them, and some interest in another. The properties in this strata are generally large, but of the remaining inventory there’s nothing particularly turn key on estate type parcels of land. That’s an issue for the market, especially as there are many upper bracket buyers in the market today.
The story of 2016/2017 is less about the primary market momentum and more about the incredible liquidity in the upper reaches of our lakefront market. Remember, from 2000 through 2009 there were just three MLS sales on Geneva that printed in excess of $5MM. In the past 12 months we’ve closed six. It’s all really quite remarkable until you remember that Geneva Lake is the best lake in the Midwest. Then it all makes a whole lot of sense.