Around 2012 I was hired by the developers to take over the marketing of the South Shore Club. The prior attempts were fine, but my angle was different. It seemed to me that the existing housing stock could never appreciate if there were developer owned vacant lots in the club providing meaningful perception challenges in the marketplace. Why buy a built house that may or may not have been very nice when there are 12 vacant lots on the market that are not only affordable, but customizable? With that very basic understanding I took over the listing of the developer owned parcels and systematically sold those lots at pricing that would have made (and did make) the early ownership of the SSC blush. But it wasn’t a flattered blush, it was an elevated blood pressure type of blush. I didn’t make a lot of friends at the time, but once the vacant inventory was cleared the market in the South Shore Club found itself on a rather stable footing. Our plan had worked.
Fast forward to today and we have a market in the South Shore Club unlike anything anyone had ever envisioned. This past summer a lakefront home in the SSC sold over $10M. And now I’m pleased to let you know about the latest sale wherein I represented the buyer to a $7M outcome of the original vacation house. I could talk about that, but I’d rather talk about the fleeting feeling that the sale has given me. In the early 1990s, I would be driven into the grounds of the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, which for decades stood on the grounds of Kayes Park, which would later become the South Shore Club. My mom would drop me off at the entrance to the old limestone academy and I’d walk timidly through the halls while the cadets looked and leered from the second floor railing that circled the grand hall, offering cat calls to the visiting girls who were a rare sight at this boys only school. I took drivers ed with the cadets and a few other kids who attended schools like mine, which were too small to offer dedicated drivers ed classes.
Years later, perhaps in 2003, my wife and I attended a broker open house in what Orren Pickell was calling The Vacation House. The home was large and fanciful, with a third floor play room, which was like nothing I had seen before. We gawked at the finishes and I wondered what it would be like to have a business that could sell such handsome, and expensive, homes. I had no reason to attend that open house. This week I closed on that same home to a buyer whom I was proud to represent and I can’t help but notice the full circle nature of such a sale. I’ve sold larger and more expensive homes, this much is true, but this one has a unique feel to it. Not only to the 15 year old who walked the now demolished academy halls. Not only to the newlywed who toured the house and the grounds. Not only to the guy who helped the developers turn the development around in 2012 and beyond. And certainly not only to the guy who just this week closed on the latest piece of inventory in the SSC. But to this guy sitting here today, wondering if this is a feeling someone has at the end of a career or just somewhere in the middle of it.