The American real estate story, as told from the mid 1990s through today, could very easily be told not through lots and lots of words, but simply through reading the … Read more

There’s a website operated by one of my competitors that lists a billion things to do in Lake Geneva. I’m sure it’s helpful. I, too, fall into the trap of … Read more

The people who make cars make them in silver and black and white and red. Most of the cars on the road fall under one of those four schemes. Is … Read more

Times were, a condo buyer was a condo buyer. They wanted a condo because they liked the idea of having someone to handle their maintenance for them, and they weren’t … Read more

I rarely play the lottery. That’s not because I once won a huge sum of money via the lottery and now I don’t need to play the lottery, it’s just … Read more

If you pick a basket full of mulberries, you’re in luck. You have a tremendous basket full of mulberries! Your basket full will look luscious, and the contents will glisten … Read more

I’m not a big fan of the term “new school”. In the same way, I don’t like “old school”. I mean, I do like the part where Frank shoots himself … Read more

Google tells me this: Since peaking in the early 1800s, use of the word “abbey” has declined steadily and thoroughly. I would assume the television show would have caused a … Read more

My appetite for the written word isn’t as voracious as it should be. Truth is, I read lots. I read lots and lots. But I don’t read too many books, … Read more

A few months ago, or maybe it was only a few weeks ago, a home in Cedar Point sold just a bit under $1.6MM. That’s not really a big deal, … Read more

The boy and his dad. It’s sweet, really. The boy isn’t so much a boy as he is a man, old enough to be one anyway. He’s playing catch with … Read more

The SSC now has just two developer owned lots left, those at lot 6 and lot 32. Priced at $595k and $649k respectively, they are fair lots and they will … Read more

The problem with being in the real estate business is that if you’re doing it all the time you lose sight of pretty much everything else. I can remember days … Read more

There was a time when I could remember things. Back then, if you were to give me your phone number, I wouldn’t write it down, at least not right away. … Read more

I spend most of my written capital giving advice to buyers. I tell them when it’s a good time to buy, when it’s the right house to buy, when they … Read more

Boating in the summer isn’t very difficult. Neither is walking down the shore path in the morning in whichever direction offers you coffee. Sitting in a lawn chair, watching the … Read more

In the spring of 2012, I bought this ten acre lot. In the spring of 2013, I finished construction on this home, that sits atop the small hill on this … Read more

I’m old enough now that I don’t remember going back to school. I remember it in the high school context, what it was like to wear the new clothes and … Read more

Early this year, I wasted a whole bunch of time putting, and then keeping, together a deal on a lakefront listing of mine. After deadlines were met and dates were … Read more

I don’t recall being all that impressed with the sky in Big Sky Country. It was a sky, sure, but it didn’t look any bigger to me than any other … Read more

The last boat study I’m aware of was conducted in 2003. This study looked at Geneva Lake on a number of different levels, including ecosystem issues, farm run-off concerns, invasive … Read more

For the first time all year, my iPhone weatherman shows a forecast with lots of 80 degree temps and even some 90 degree temps. Remember those summer nights from previous … Read more

I have never been to Florida in the summer. The reason for this abstention is because I have all of my faculties about me, and I have increasingly little interest … Read more

I struggle a bit with understanding how the news pundits explain housing. If, for instance, sales are up, then housing is doing well. Yay! If sales are down, housing is … Read more

I suppose it could be said that spring buyers are those with immediacy on their minds. If you search for a home in March, at the tail end of a … Read more

The pool was rather perfect looking. Perhaps one or two groupings of a few individuals hung to its watery edges, but no one was swimming. The life guard was on … Read more

I’m always surprised how many people watch properties. They don’t look at properties, necessarily, but they watch them. They look at them online, they drive by them in person. They … Read more

I have made a habit of taking one teensy tiny vacation per month. It lasts two days. I load my family into the good old family truckster, and we drive … Read more

I was a senior in high school. Around that time, I had taken to using an old leather carryall. It was a soft briefcase with a shoulder strap, and I … Read more

I think if I were a condo buyer, be it in a sweaty city or up here at the lake, I’d prefer to be on a high floor. Not because … Read more

In my mind, I develop all sorts of patterns. I think, this blog should be market updates on Monday, huge departures into gibberish on Wednesdays, and market recaps on Fridays. … Read more

The headline was sensational, the subject near and dear to my cold heart: Zillow Aquires Trulia; Let The Real Estate Hunger Games Begin. So, Zillow and Trulia are on the … Read more

Babies are fed mashed peas. The pea jar is opened, perhaps warmed so that it is warm, but never hot, and then a plastic spoon labeled BPA FREE stirs the … Read more

There are many ways to get caught in the wrong house at the wrong time. Almost all of these are honest means, leaving no fault on the owner who was … Read more

To be a seller in spring, is to be as a youth, full of optimism and energy, a spout of vision that has yet to be set off track by … Read more

If you call your hair cutter lady, or fella, and he or she is on vacation when you call, you ask the receptionist when he/she will return, and then you … Read more

I once had a customer who told me that the Lake Geneva real estate market lags behind the California real estate market, but that everything that happens in California will, … Read more

It seemed to me that if the boat tipped over, I’d be trapped inside the cabin, or worse, under the sail as that sail swung from the sky to the … Read more

My dad will, somewhat famously, hawk anything from the lawn next to our real estate office. There is nothing safe from this side-of-road mentality. He’s sold several John Deere tractors, … Read more

I drove through Lake Geneva yesterday, as I do every day. I drove into town, I stopped at the various lights, and I drove out of town, around the lake, … Read more

Speaking of rising tides, two more lakefront homes just sold this week. One of those homes was sold by yours truly, the other, sadly, by someone else. These two sales … Read more

There are too many assumptions made in the statement that claims a rising tide lifts all ships. First off, tides are anything but stable. They are predictable, sure, but they … Read more

In the event that you are selling your home in, say, Mobile, Alabama, please pay very close attention. If you’ve had lots of activity, and you just had an offer … Read more

During the year of 2004, Gudrun was the most popular name given in Iceland to newborn baby girls. It also happened to be the name that a pair of first … Read more

I could never live in a small condo in the city. My brother does this, the city living in the small condo. I don’t really know how he does it … Read more

This rain is getting to be entirely too much. I’m not a farmer, though if you caught a glimpse of my strawberry patch you might be willing to consider a … Read more

I’ll live my entire life without buying Waterworks tile. I have dabbled with buying a Waterworks faucet or two, but even in that I’ve backed off in the later innings … Read more

Last summer, on a particularly sunny, remarkably humid day, I walked into that house for the first time. It wasn’t much of a house, and the land was wide but … Read more

I once had a client refer to a million dollars as a stick. Like, a stick. A woody thing that fell or was chopped from a tree. It would have … Read more

In certain price ranges here for certain sorts of properties, the buyer doesn’t need to possess any real vision. Chances are, if you’d like a nice enough home for around … Read more

The business of making pools is, well, pretty big business. A rapidly growing segment of the pool market is in so called “natural” pools. The concept of fixing nature is … Read more

That many lakefront home buyers are already lake home owners makes a lot of sense. If I have a $4MM home for sale on the lake, I need a buyer … Read more

The lakefront market on Geneva is a strange creation. It is at once a whirlwind of activity, of showings and tours and offers and emails. It is a dizzying flurry, … Read more

The roads in Manitoba are really quite simple. Some of the roads run North and South, while the other roads run East or West. This is the entirety of the … Read more

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I bought old houses and did my best to fix them up. I can’t say that I enjoyed this, but … Read more

All homes generally do one thing well. In the game of real estate, it’s usually that one thing that makes a house valuable, or otherwise desirable to at least one … Read more

If the song is right, and the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, which in turn is connected to the leg bone, then it shouldn’t be such a … Read more

This is either an extremely exciting week, an extremely busy week, or an extremely depressing week, a soul crushing span of five work days. In the winter, it’s easy to … Read more

It would be easy to confuse this day with any other that came before it. It’s gray in the sky and cold in the air. It’s wet underfoot. It’s snowing … Read more

No one would say that Abbey Springs is an architectural gem. I suppose that’s not entirely true, as people once bought bright blue PT Cruisers and they drove them home, … Read more

He asked if finding 230 makes the game any less fun. His question was meant to imply that there would be no fun in finding these if they were, in … Read more

Foreclosures are like old relatives that live far away. Not the sort that you get birthday cards from, nor the sort that you talk to on the phone every now … Read more

I write lots of words about prices. Pricing. Price. They sounds the same, but they’re different. Pricing, that’s what we do in hopes of encouraging a buyer to offer us … Read more

It was a prophecy without a year attached. There was no target date, no decree that it would be on the year that came so many decades, years, and months … Read more

I admit to being bored with this market. By all accounts, including mine, the market is rather hot. There are pending contracts in every segment of our vacation home market, … Read more

I’m thinking of buying a new boat today. Not some sort of normal, modest boat, but a brand new, super shiny, crazy-fast, prohibitively expensive one. Renters buy normal boats these … Read more

It’s raining again. Sitting in a dark house, with stone walls and large timber framing that reaches from wall to wall, exposed. There’s rain outside, pittering and pattering against the … Read more

It wouldn’t have been that hard to find me. The sun was out, the grass was growing, my orange and white Simplicity lawn tractor had at least fifty cents of … Read more

Last winter, I decided to add Netflix to my life. I did this because I, ignorantly, thought that Netflix was a movie genie capable of delivering my cinematic wishes to … Read more

This morning I had a wonderful topic in mind. Well, maybe not wonderful, but at least passable, which is better than the alternative, but still less than wonderful. Anyway, I … Read more

I think it would be fun to write about baseball. Not baseball the game, but baseball the season, the team. To be a beat writer is to be faced with … Read more

If I were to write about those woody things that grow from the ground, those things with bark and branches and leaves, I would probably call them what they are: … Read more

My father has no hobbies. Not a single one. He used to play a bit of golf, but that effort only produced two lasting memories. There was the un-witnessed hole-in-one … Read more

Saturday was a nice spring day. It was so nice, in fact, that I went to the hardware store and bought a trailer hitch ball. It was bright and shiny, … Read more

Someday, I won’t write about the wealth effect. I’ll just write about trees, or fish, or about life and death, probably one or the other, but likely both, on alternating … Read more

There was still snow out there, but really none at all if you compare it to the snow cover from just a few short weeks ago. I found myself near … Read more

I think I can remember the days when pricing real estate was fun. Back then, I could wow and thrill potential customers with the promise of immediate and tangible real … Read more

By now it should be obvious to you; I do not live here and play here because I so deeply love downtown Lake Geneva. In fact, I have taken to … Read more

It was probably January of 2010 when I first hatched this idea. This blog had been doing fine, and some out there found it to be a valuable and quasi-entertaining … Read more

There are many, many things you can do to sell your home. You can put a sign in the yard, because that often works. Or you can hold an open … Read more

There was a little quote on Twitter the other day, attributed to someone anonymous, or at least anonymous to me and to you. She wrote, “okay people who eat popcorn … Read more

After this variety of winter, you’d think I’d welcome the spring. With it comes the sun and the wind, and some warmth that disguises itself as cold when the wind … Read more

Whatever this last weekend was supposed to be- spring, winter, or some hideous spawn of the two- it is thankfully over. This week, whether it finds us warm or cold … Read more

There is a very pretty building in the city of Chicago located at 2550 North Lakeview Avenue. The building is called Lincoln Park 2550, but only because that name sounds … Read more

My wife is generally in a fair mood. She’s from the great white north, which I didn’t capitalize on purpose because even though it’s to our North, and even though … Read more

When a market is down, I have absolutely no problem kicking it. I also don’t like to make excuses for market segments, as I’d rather try to identify the problems … Read more

I am not in the business of manufacturing. I do not make anything, I do not warehouse anything. I do sell something, and I do so through a network of … Read more

Let’s quick pretend you’re looking for a cabin. Not a cabin here, mind you, but a cabin anywhere. Not exactly anywhere, but within this state, somewhere, North or South, East … Read more

Whenever a nurse is about to strap that arm band on me, I warn them. Before they squeeze that bulb to apply the pressure, I tell them that there’s a … Read more

I admit to being less productive when the weather is bad. In the summer, when there’s a big storm, I can work just fine. In fact, I work a bit … Read more

We needn’t look too far back to understand what happened here, assuming we’re the smart ones who know that what happened then is quite important when trying to figure out … Read more

The details of the story are not clear to me, even now. They were never clear to me. The day that my uncle broke through the ice on his snowmobile … Read more

This is the in between. The entry level lake access market is somewhat active at the moment, with a few pending contracts and a few closings already on the 2014 … Read more

My children go to school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. This current school year started in very early September, and on those select days between then and now, they … Read more

I’m not exactly sure how many mortgages I’ve obtained. I was 18 when I was granted my first mortgage on my first house, and in the years that have flown … Read more

January. From this vantage point in February, I don’t see much of a different between what I see today and what I saw then, in January. The lake is still … Read more

There’s a special font that mechanics use to spell out their names on their shirts. It has a cursive flow to it, like an old hand written letter from your … Read more

Well, it seems that most of Chicago was scared away from the lake this weekend by that forecast. Thanks a lot, weather personalities. The weekend was rather perfect, with that … Read more

I know that lakerights matter. You probably know it, too. We take this knowledge for granted, that it’s obvious to us in a lake-centric community that it is imperative that … Read more