Some interesting stats this morning on the health of our lakefront home market on Geneva. Remember, for the sake of these comparisons, I only use true lakefront homes with private frontage on Geneva. There are currently 32 such homes for sale on Geneva according to our MLS. Of those 32 available, one is listed as pending with a contract. To note, the property that is pending is absolutely beautiful, and has been on the open market for roughly a month. Year to date we’ve had 6 lakefront sales, which on the surface doesn’t sound like much. In fact, it sounds pretty lame, even to me. So lame in fact that I had to do a little year to date shopping to look at our market in some historical context.
The height of our market here was undoubtedly 2005. A market where property was a liquid investment, and happy buyers and even happier sellers flooded the market. Our volume never reached the sort of fevered pace that many other resort markets experienced, a sign of restraint that has ultimately saved our market from the significant price declines that are prevelant elsewhere. From January 1 to June 22 2005, our market grossed a total of 7 Geneva lakefront homes sold. We currently have 6 sold. Not bad for a bad market, eh? To look a little deeper, I lined up the sales stats for the years between our market “high” and the current year.
2006- 9 YTD sales
2007- 11 YTD sales
2008- 7 YTD sales
So yes, we are down in volume from the YTD volume high of 2007, and we’re still down for every year we’ve looked at in the study, but certainly not by much. What’s happening in this market is buyers are looking the right property, which is not to say that in previous years they weren’t doing just that. It’s to say that there’s a general lack of broad motivation in the lakefront market right now. When you remove the fear that someone else will buy the home if you don’t, you remove much of the motivation that spurred on the market from 2003 to 2007. It’s fear that makes people buy, and when you remove that fear, buyers largely sit back and wait for the right deal to come around. In the case of the lakefront sales so far this year, nearly all of them have been pretty solid values, with the possible exception of two of those sales. The buyer with the offer pending? Well done, you are indeed buying a beautiful lakefront home.
To the buyers still waiting for the “right” property, let’s get together and work on finding it. 90 and humid is miserable in the city or suburbs, but 90 and humid is just about perfect when you’re cruising on a boat on the most beautiful lake in the midwest. Oh, an unlike a boat cruise on a bigger, angrier, greener lake we’ve all seen before, a boat ride on Geneva hardly ever ends with a Coast Guard rescue helicopter overhead.
Statistics taken from MLS and are deemed reliable but in no way guaranteed.