Love The One You’re With

Or is it love the one you win? Either way, so many attitudes about love and relationships can be easily assigned to our relationships with houses. If you set out in life looking for a girl with tremendous character, long legs, brown hair, and a 4.0 NTRP tennis ranking, I would applaud you on your lofty set of standards. If you can only find a girl with the long legs and brown hair, chances are you’re going to keep looking, after all, you’re discerning. But if your criteria is heavily weighted in favor of the long legs and brown hair, the character and tennis skills might just fade into oblivion and you’ll marry a pretty long legged girl who can’t play tennis and who shoplifts regularly from Macy’s.

It’s the same with our housing choices, really. Let’s say your housing demands are as follows: lake view, boat slip, charming cottage style, dead end road, oh, and a green roof with white shingle siding. If those were your Lake Geneva real estate criteria, I for one, would loudly applaud you. If those were your goals, and price concerns were not present, we could probably find you a perfect cottage, right down to the green roof (Congress Club). But what happens when price is thrown into the equation, and you’re looking for all of the above with a maximum price of $600k? Things just got a lot more complicated, and the odds of you finding your dream vacation home just got a lot longer.

Like a single 46 year old working at Aldi’s, the list of have-to-have’s, might just have to turn into a list of would-like-to-have’s. The dream vacation home does indeed exist, but it doesn’t always exist in the original dreamt up format. The Lake Geneva market is quite small, so the options are limited moreso than other markets that don’t rely on only one lake with a finite amount of shoreline. It’s this rarity that keeps the values where they are, but it’s also this rarity that makes buyers go mad with frustration. Some buyers even get so frustrated that they end up making a Michstake. Maybe there’s no reason to be frustrated after all. Maybe in order to find vacation utopia at Lake Geneva you just have to prioritize your dream list a little differently.

Let’s take that same list and give some weight to various items. The lake view, you just can’t live without, so we’ll keep that and give it the first stall in our new weighted system. The boat slip would be nice, but let’s face it, you don’t even have a boat and the closest you’ve ever come to driving one is standing next to the captain on an off shore fishing trip in Siesta Key. The cottage charm is pretty important, so we’ll place that right next to the lake view, the dead end road and the peace in provides is also key, so that’ll come next. The green roof? Not that important, seeing as how they still sell green shingles if the classic mood should strike. I almost forgot price- if price is a factor but let’s say $600k is ideal, but $850k is doable, then price factors in but not as prominently as before. Our reworked list has an order to it, and what was impossible now became possible. 1. Lake view 2. Cottage charm 3. Less than $850k 4. Dead end road 5. Boatslip 6. Green roof.

This market, as unfortunate as it is to say, is a market of compromises. Oh sure, you can hold out for all 6 items, in order, right down to the green roof, but you very well may fall by the wayside and be labeled a “serial looker”. My dad started selling real estate in 1977, and from the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, my father sold a lot of lakefront real estate on Geneva. When I was younger, he’d take me for boat rides and point out the houses that he’d previously shown to clients in decades past. We’d relive in housing horror the homes that buyers who “knew better’ had passed up. It’s a lakefront on the North Shore that was $250k that would now be worth $4MM. A cottage in Fontana that a buyer had a shot at for $115k that 20 years later is every bit of $1.2MM. A condo that was $70k in the late 1980’s that now sells for $750k. Tales of buyers that were capable of purchasing, wanting to purchase, but just couldn’t quite weigh their buying wish list properly.

In Lake Geneva, chances are you’re not going to find exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for location, that is not only the most intelligent criteria to weigh the most heavily, it’s also the easiest criteria to satisfy. Things only get complicated when you come up here with the thought about that cottage for $600k with lakeview, boatslip, Viking range, dead end street, and that goofy green roof too. If you don’t mind waiting, I’d still love to work on finding that cottage for you, so don’t hesitate to ask. It’s just that next time you think about your vacation home ideal, try to think about it in terms of spouse selection. Brown hair turns gray, and long legs just get wrinkly, but character never fades and you can play tennis well into your 80’s. Green roofs ultimately need replacing, but a location where you can hear the waves at night as you read a book on your front porch, well, that sort of thing never gets old.