I imagine it to be difficult to be an artist. Or at least to be a fledgling artist. To be one is to draw beautifully, to be convinced of your worth even as others are not. To be an artist is to struggle, or to starve. But that’s what it’s like to be an artist who hasn’t yet sold something of high value. Once you’ve sold something worth something, then others have come to know your worth. If a painting is worth $20k, that’s wonderful. If no one pays you that $20k, it’s nice to have a price tag of $20k on your pretty painting, but it doesn’t pay bills. When being an artist must get fun is when someone first pays you $20k for that painting, because once one person pays it there’s an assumption that someone else will also, and that’s when it becomes fun to be an artist. Or so I imagine.
This is how it has been to be the South Shore Club. To be forever convinced of your own value, even while others walk your aisles and aren’t so easily swayed. But this is how it has been to be the South Shore Club, and those days are behind us now. The South Shore Club has found solid footing. The market is set, the prices firmed, the existence of value no longer speculative, but affirmed. On Friday, I closed 1588 Lakeside Lane for $1.8MM. That property closed at a large discount to a previous ask, but when the property closed at $1.8MM it closed at a price that makes complete and utter market sense within the South Shore Club and in doing so, it cemented the value range for the club.
But it didn’t do this all on its own, it had some help. Two years ago a foreclosure popped on Forest Hill. That property closed at $1.75MM, and seemed at first blush to be tragically low. It wasn’t. But for a while it was the only recent sale, and it gave pause to buyers who wondered when the next shoe would drop. 2011 was a quiet year for the SSC. 2012, however, was different. The year started with a change- a representation change- for some of the properties. I was lucky enough to be introduced to the club and to list two homes and a couple lots, and was tasked with selling properties that hadn’t proven all that easy to sell.
In May, I sold a lakefront home in the SSC for $3.575MM. It was, and is, a most beautiful home. Around that same time a private sale closed in the $2.5MM range, and before that a lot on Forest Hill sold next to the one that I had sold in 2011. There was life in the South Shore Club, but the only bottom side of the market had been set by that REO sale from 2010. We needed something recent. Something to support the underside of the club and set a bottom that owners, and future owners, could bank on. Enter the sale from Friday at $1.8MM. That was the fourth sale in the SSC this year, and in those sales the top, bottom, and middle of the market was firmly established. An established sales range gives confidence to new owners, and with six unsold developer lots still remaining, there is reason to think that buyers will now see what is possible in the SSC and work their future values off not some imagined figure that an appraiser found a way to justify, but after actual hard, recent, fair market sales.
With these closings, it’s now easy to see where the market at the South Shore Club fits into our broader vacation home market. Moreover, it makes it easy to understand where the vacant lots will sell and what buyers can expect to see for a future valuation when the time to build arrives. Perhaps even more importantly, the sales have taken properties from disinterested hands and placed those properties into stronger, more interested hands. New blood revives developments, and the SSC has had a serious infusion over the past three months.
What to expect now? Well, expect some of the out of line pricing of existing homes to fall in line with the sales range set so far this year. Expect vacant lots to more easily sell, and expect more construction to occur here in the next 9 months. Overall, expect to treat the South Shore Club with the respect it deserves not just as a beautiful and fanciful place, but as a solid segment of our Geneva lakefront real estate market. I recently took over the remaining developer owned lots in the SSC, and look forward to selling these last few properties for my clients. I’m flattered to have played a large part in solidifying the South Shore Club’s market positioning, and am most pleased to see the market provide support to contemplative future owners. The South Shore Club, your table is ready.