There are many things in the works today, and not one of them is deserving of an entire post, so consider this an odds and ends update of sorts, which is to imply that my normal fragmented snippets of thought are somehow better than this. They probably aren’t, but still. The items in need of mention today include, but are not limited to, the following: Moratorium on inaccurate superlatives. Moratorium on excessive use of Photoshop. New temporary office with a view. New permanent office with a fireplace. Lakefront condo market possibly on fire. We begin.
Last Thursday evening, in the mostly pouring rain, I moved the last remnants out of my office at 49 West Geneva Street in Williams Bay. The office had been my business home for the last eight years, maybe more, maybe less, and it was a fine little office. On the heels of building a new home earlier this year, the office seemed rather inadequate. It seemed rather plain. It was a bit cold in the winter and a bit confining in the summer. Which is why today, Edward Jones is tearing the building up, refinishing and upgrading the interior so that it can become the new home base of one of their wealth management members. My new office, at 57 West Geneva Street, Williams Bay, will be right next door to the old one, on the patch of grass between the Library and my old parking lot.
Construction will hopefully begin next week on this new building, and it should be a tedious, time consuming, possibly redeeming experience. If I must confess as to the primary reason for this movement, it has a lot to do with fire. In the summer, I treat my office as a launching point for my day, and a necessary operations center that I play tag with for the remainder of a summer afternoon. I am in and out, incessantly. In the winter, however, I am more prone to office work, to sitting and typing or to sitting and talking. Occasionally, I’ll stand and talk too. In the winter, on those cold and snowy days, I like to be warm. The fireplaces in my new home beckon, and if I am to fight that call and commit to a full day of winter office work, then it’s obvious that I need a fireplace. And so it goes, an entire office project shamelessly undertaken so that I might reach the singular goal of having a fireplace in my office. People have done more for less. Oh, and I may open up the office to the consideration of adding new agents, but that’s no promise.
My temporary office is in this lakefront office on the lobby level of the Bella Vista Hotel in Lake Geneva. While this is not the official temporary office, this is the office that I’ll spend the next five or so months working from. The views could not be better. I’ll get to watch this fall turn to winter, and I’ll have a front row seat at watching the ice up, the progression of fishermen onto that ice, and the ice-centric activities that follow. It should be a fun spot, and I’ll be here nearly every morning and then on and off again all day. Should you wish to stop in and see me, just walk into the hotel and down the stairs towards the lakefront lobby area. I’m on the south side of the building, up front.
Advertising is a necessary evil of real estate, and it is no secret that the language used preys on the simplistic desires of many consumers. In real estate, we stack hyperbole upon hyperbole, and we rarely admit that we’ve generally created an untidy mountain of inaccurate superlatives. I try desperately not to do this, but my restraint is not shared by my competition. If a view is to be described as stunning, I should truly be stunned. Weak in the knees, stunned. Draw dropping, drool inducing stunnery. This is never the case. A stunning view is a captivating one, which should never be confused with a sliver of a view or a peak of a view or a stand on your tippy toes and crane your neck as far to the left as possible view. Stunning views that are not stunning shouldn’t ever be called stunning. I say this, and I do that, but until consumers stop lapping up misplaced adjectives expect those adjectives to flow at an ever increasing rate. This is why every house is AMAZING, and STUNNING, and yes, that small closet with the broom in it is indeed SPACIOUS. It makes me tired.
The same goes with Photoshop, and this is becoming an unchecked epidemic. I beg you to do me a favor. If you find yourself on a real estate website, and the hosts pictures portray Geneva Lake as though it were a small atoll in the middle of an azure sea, please hit CONTROL/ALT/DELETE, and then repent before returning to my site. Wide angle lenses are just as bad, and if a room appears on the interweb to be approximately 75′ wide by 130′ deep, chances are it really isn’t. Chances are it’s 14′ x 17′, and the agent is working overtime to make you think that home is something it isn’t. There should be truth in pictures, and as my photographer friends often proclaim in the form of a question, “that photo tells the story, doesn’t it?“. Geneva Lake is a beautiful shade of blue, and today as I see it through these large office windows I see nothing in need of adjusting. I will adjust contrast a touch in order to make a photo look more dynamic, but the color hue should never be adjusted. It needn’t be. If we sold real estate on other lakes, we’d have no choice but to inject a badly needed dose of blue into our greenish-brown lake, but this is Geneva gosh darnit, and we have all the color we can handle.
Lastly, the condo market on Geneva is mostly on fire. It’s a bit shocking, really, and there are deals happening with a frequency that hasn’t been seen since the early 2000s. The Abbey Villa has had two harborfront units sell in the last 90 days, Fontana Shores has a pending sale, after the closing I had there in August. Bay Colony South has a deal pending, and I have a closing today on a Bay Colony unit- the first sale there in several years. Bay Shore has had two sales in the past two weeks. There is momentum here, and if I told you what the two best deals on the lake are, as of this morning, I’d direct you to my two bedroom at Fontana Shores listed in the mid $300ks, and then I’d direct you over to my four bedroom lakefront unit at Eastbank, complete with canopied boat slip and two car attached garage, listed at $775k. That unit was probably worth around $1.2MM at the peak, so this ultimate sales price will represent an incredible value. Yes, these are my listings, but that isn’t what makes me aware of the value they possess. The market dictates the value, and I’m just the sherpa.
Enjoy your weekend, and with any luck I’ll see you at the lake.