I don’t know why I bother with these foreclosure updates. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had to find a way to write over a thousand posts during the last four years, and that number doesn’t always come easily. Nor does it come naturally. Though I suppose at times it does, but on days like this it doesn’t. I have many things to do, other things to put off, and, later, when this day fades, some annoying earthen landscape edges to spade. The other reason I write these is so that you don’t have to go on wondering what is happening at Lake Geneva. God knows I don’t want you checking realtytrac or some other national entity that has no narrative to explain their vague stats. This is why I do this.
Today, the foreclosure market remains as boring as ever. There is little sex appeal here, no catastrophic implosions, no spreading hysteria, no unrivaled abandonment of annoying monthly mortgage payments. The market here remains stable, with a little sprinkle of new foreclosure activity mixed in. First, the sheriff’s sale notices. Nothing much new here. Some houses here and some there, mostly in Elkhorn and Bloomfield and Geneva Township. Geneva National has a few within that latter township, but not so many that a dramatic increase can be noticed. There is little else scheduled for sale now that matters to me, and by default, you. Unless you love Elkhorn, in which case I doubt you’d be reading this. You’d be reading the Elkhorn version of this blog, which I’m sure doesn’t exist.
Anyway, digging deeper, beyond the lazy sheriff’s sale list, there are some other things brewing. There is a potential sale of a landmark lakefront at Clearsky Lodge. This possible foreclosure/bankruptcy isn’t terribly exciting to me because the home has been in and out of financial trouble before. This is hardly news. But it might make its way onto the open market this time, and if it does, and the price is soothing, then we should pay attention. Stay tuned for that, or email me should you wish to be kept abreast of the situation there, private like.
The rest of the Lis Pendens notices bore me. These, as you know, are notices of serious delinquency, and these notices are what keep me from believing any broad market recovery is eminent. As long as borrowers default with regularity, no market can recover. If the market is a high volume market, that market can absorb this sort of activity perhaps indefinitely without prices dragging too much further (Chicago). If the market is a low volume market, the market better have few delinquencies or the market will have no choice but to suffer. Thankfully, the Lake Geneva real estate market is a low volume market, but it isn’t terribly plagued by these delinquent owners. Phew.
There are some pending issues at several Geneva National units, and more trouble at Abbey Hill and Abbey Ridge and the Abbey Villas. Perhaps it has something to do with the name- Abbey. I don’t see any pending trouble on the lakefront, neither the residential lakefront market nor the condominium market- excepting two potential trouble spots in the condo market. There is some potential difficulty at Harbor Watch, but there’s really no way for me to know where that current situation stands. There is also some trouble at Somerset, but the unit there has been in and out of trouble for quite a while, which always leads me to believe the trouble is stopped once it escalates to actual foreclosure levels.
There are no important revelations today, but I suppose that’s the point. If Lake Geneva is to remain a vacation home stalwart worthy of your hard earned dollars, then it cannot suffer from foreclosures in the same way that lesser markets will. Expect the situation here to remain the same, which means it will stay boring. If we must develop a warning scale, like the Homeland Security folks have, with green meaning there isn’t a foreclosure in sight and yellow meaning there are so many foreclosures the local governments are considering selling entire towns to REO investors, we remain, happily, a perfect shade of greenish/blue.