Geneva Lakefront Sales Volume

Buyers find their agents through various means. Some of those means are intelligent and worthy, others not so much. If a friend refers a buyer to an agent that they know, this is wonderful! If that referred agent specializes in the sort of property that this buyer is searching for, this is a great thing. How do we know if that agent specializes in such properties? Well, silly, that agent tells you so! Why, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Buyer, I am a lake specialist. Haven’t you read my card? This is generally all it takes for the relationship to begin, and after some showings and some offers, there is a sale. High fives all around. This is one scenario, and it is probably the most common scenario through which buyers find their representative agents. This is fine, but as demonstrated above, it can also lead to problems.

The interweb is a fabulous way to find everything from Sushi to Shoe Repair, from Realtors to Recliners. In order to be a successful agent, some form of web presence is an absolute necessity. These websites can be static, or they can be vibrant (like this one). Either way, as long as the site self defines that agent as a Lake Specialist, things should be fine. Or not. Either way, this is probably, aside from the personal referral, the way that most buyers meet their agents. This too is absolutely fine.

The problem arises, at least in Lake Geneva, once that introduction is made. There should be some follow up by the buyer to see what exactly this agent has to offer. Is the agent proficient in the particular market? Is the agent not just intelligent, but perhaps also successful within this segment? If we’re at Lake Geneva, which we always are, and the buyer is of a lakefront trajectory, then these questions should be quite easy to answer. But how? How can we answer these questions? Um, with statistics (culled from the MLS).

Over the past 24 months, there have been 45 true lakefront home sales on Geneva Lake, including Glenwood Springs and the South Shore Club. We are excluding quasi-lakefront home sales like the ones that have occurred on the lakefront in the Lake Geneva Club and Brookwood. Of those sales, the buy side has been worked by one of ten agents that actually, truthfully specialize in lakefront sales no fewer than 37 of those 45 sales. Every once in a while sales slip to the broad agent market and someone fills in a buy-side gap, but as you can see from these figures, that’s somewhat rare. To word it differently, if you’re looking at a lakefront buy on Geneva, there are 10 agents, give or take, that make up the majority of this market.

I suppose it should be noted that of those past 24 months of lakefront sales, I have been on the buy side of 7 of them, making me the top agent for buy side lakefront representation between 10/7/2011 and 10/7/2013. That doesn’t matter all that much, unless of course you’re a lakefront buyer, then it might just matter a teensy bit. But if we use this statistic as a standalone number, it doesn’t tell the whole story. While some play the real estate game with the goal of simply buying some property, any property, and quickly, I tend to have clients that play the game to win. In the lakefront real estate game, winning means buying properties with strong value, great potential for future appreciation, and perhaps of the most immediate importance, securing those properties at prices that beat the broader market.

Of the past 24 months of sales, the total transacted value of that lakefront real estate was $105,524,000. That’s some serious change, and I’d put that two year tally up against any inland body of water in these United States, excepting Lake Tahoe because they have Larry Ellison and we do not. The list price of those collective properties was $118,784,590, meaning the sales price registered at an average of .888% of the asking price. For transactions in which I worked with the buy side, my sale price was .864% of the asking price, which doesn’t matter until you consider that on a $3MM sale that means an average of $72,000 saved by clients that are working with me, which isn’t significant unless you think $72,000 is a lot of money, which I do.

Those numbers are a bit wonky, and on the surface these numbers may simply look like self congratulatory manipulations. But to think that way is to entirely miss the boat- the goal is, instead, to present the case to buyers that not only is this market one that I’m leading, it’s one that I’m beating. If a lakefront home is in your near, or far off future, I’d love to help you find it and buy it for a price that’s better than the price you’d pay without me.