While some are busy struggling to explain how property taxes work, let’s discuss the actual Lake Geneva market. Maybe someday I’ll write an article on how property insurance works, but for now, I’ll just continue breaking down the market with insights that have actual value.
For a year where interest rates hovered over 7% for many months, I was surprised to see the rate of financed transactions increase over the prior year. A financed rate of just 26% is still quite low, but considering we had just an 14% financed rate in 2022 I find the number to be curious. If you were buying a lakefront home when interest rates were some variable of 3%, it made perfect sense why you’d wish to lock in cheap long term debt. But with rates over 7%, I would have expected more deals to be paid outright with cash, or to at least present as cash with funding behind the scenes via a PLA or PLOC. Regardless, the cash deal rate remains in line with recent trends, and I anticipate Geneva will always be a market where we close around 75% of our transactions with cash funding.