I don’t have any lakefront deals pending this morning. I say that because over the past 15 years, there haven’t been very many days when that statement was true. Oh sure, I have a few things here and there that might happen in the next day or week or month or year, but that’s always the case. What’s not always the case is the lack of a pending lakefront sale, and so here I am, sitting at this desk, looking out at the humidity and the clouds and the women rushing to and from the farmers market with fresh flowers that will soon wilt, and I’m wondering what to make of this mid-summer.
But is it mid-summer? Or is it the end of summer? Is this the prime time, or was that a couple of weeks ago? Last weekend I was in New York City visiting my son, and as I walked a million steps per day I noticed something alarming. The leaves in Central Park were falling. Collecting in the gutters next to the bags of steamy trash, right next to the tracked remnants that someone’s dog left behind and someone else stepped in, there they were: the leaves of fall. I would say that I crunched on the leaves but nothing is crunchy in a NYC summer, there is only limp, wet, and sticky. I saw the leaves and I avoided the tracked bits from the dogs and I thought for a moment about how lovely fall is. It’s football and it’s chili and it’s Thanksgiving and it’s blue water and sweaters. I forced myself to stop thinking about fall, and I looked to the skies where the towers loomed and the sun baked. Fall, soon enough I suppose.
But the market today doesn’t know what season it is. Some things are being listed and selling fast, and other things are selling slowly. Aged inventory is mostly being absorbed in our lake access market, but is it really? The transactional agents that populate our market now are pressing and pushing and throwing around random offers that make zero sense, unaware or unafraid, I’m not sure which, of what the market looks like outside of the rushed chaos of seeking quick, overpriced sales. I avoid that nonsense, because I see the market for what it is: Hot for ten days, cool for seven, sorta hot for the next twelve, and then hot again for two. The market is chaotic, perhaps because the participants are fueling the chaos, or perhaps because this is just what the world is today. Short on attention span, short on contemplation, short on uniformity.
Today there’s not a single lakefront home for sale on the open market. I’m working on some things behind the scenes, as I always am, and I’m sure that other participants are doing the same. There’s a vacant lot for sale on the water that may or may not have a contract on it, and there are several off-water lake access homes in the $1M+ range pending sale, and many others available on and off market. I see some value today in this segment, because if entry level lakefront is $4M+, which is most certainly is right now, then why shouldn’t an off-water lake access market thrive in the $1.5-3.5M range? It should, and yet there are pockets of value here. I like those pockets, so if you’d like to hear more about what makes sense and what doesn’t, we can talk about that sometime.
For now I think we’ll all do what we must, which is try to enjoy the middle of summer without looking fondly at the coming fall. I do the same forward thinking when the leaves are down and the snow should be arriving. That is, looking to the romance of the first snow even before we’ve carved the Thanksgiving turkey. I do the same in the winter when the slush slogs and the trees bud under March snow. Spring, that’s what I’m after. And then when spring lingers and the rain pounds and the summery dirt is still only spring mud, I think about how much I long for the days of late July when the cicadas sing and the sailboats sail. That’s the problem with being me, I suppose. Dave Curry: Certified Seasons Guy. If you want to talk about the market and the pockets of value and the supply side pockets of opportunism, I’m here to help.