I really like Fontana. Like, like like Fontana. While other towns struggle with self worth issues, and spend their days staring into the mirror wondering where it all went wrong (hint- it went wrong when you planted the weeds), Fontana has little time for reflection. Fontana, you see, is too busy improving itself. After a record pace of renovation and improvement, the Village is at it again this fall with the addition of some more paver sidewalks. There’s a valuable teaching moment that other municipalities should take notice of, and in reality, what Fontana is doing is incredibly simple, yet the execution escapes most towns and villages. Fontana has picked a theme, and they’re using similar materials, similar textures, and similar finishes, on every project they’re doing in town, no matter the location. The end result will be a cohesive brand that will make the Village quite complete, and thoroughly connected.
These improvements alone are not reason enough to make Fontana your ideal vacation destination, but they certainly don’t hurt. Fontana has, for the better part of this decade, been the crown jewel in the Lake Geneva real estate market. Much of that has to do with Gordy’s and Chuck’s, and as silly as it sounds, much of the glamor of the little lakeside village is owed to the Cobalt boat itself. That’s right, it’s materialism on parade, and people can’t seem to get enough of it. There’s something about that Fontana lakefront, with the white piers strapped with $125k boats, painted in shades of white, blue, and red. The Gordy’s phenomenon has played a huge, if understated, roll in the resurgence of Fontana real estate, a roll that the owners of Gage Marine in Williams Bay really ought to study.
Fontana real estate has been remarkably stable this year, and although pricing is down on average 15% to 20%, the residential volume has held up quite nicely. So far in 2009 there have been at least 30 single family sales. By the looks of the MLS, there aren’t any transactions pending right now, so the 30 sales may be pretty close to where we end up when 2009 wraps in a couple months. To look back at the market here in hopes of gauging the strength of this year, 2008 had a YTD total of 28 sales. 31 sales in 2007, and 35 in 2006. Even when compared with the 2006 market highs, our 30 sales in 2009 look quite solid.
A unique feature of Fontana, when compared to Williams Bay or Lake Geneva, is that the majority of the homes in Fontana have lake access. The large associations of Country Club Estates, Indian Hills, Buena Vista, and Abbey Springs, make up a significant portion of the overall Fontana housing supply, and all of these associations boast private lake rights to Geneva. It’s in the multitude of vacation home associations that the strength of the market lies. Fontana has also experienced a very low number of foreclosures this year, while the YTD foreclosure total is unknown to me, I’d guess it’s somewhere around 8 properties for the entire year, including at least two that are in the process of foreclosure right now.
Yes, Fontana is quite a spectacle, and it just might be the perfect setting for your soon-to-be vacation home. With ample lakefront parks, a massive sand beach, vastly superior public spaces, and an exciting lakefront social scene, there’s little doubt that it’s my own personal favorite Walworth County village. If you’ve never wandered around Fontana, give me a call and I’ll buy you some lunch at Gordy’s. After, we can take a look at some of those new Cobalts. After all, a pier just isn’t a pier without a new Cobalt boat in the slip. Maybe a white one. As the old saying goes “there are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white. And only an idiot paints a boat black!”