Blog : Lake Geneva

Memorial Day Weekend
David Curry

Memorial Day Weekend

Well, here we are. On the cusp. Don’t forget, this isn’t it. This is the cusp. This isn’t summer. This is a dress rehearsal. This is the weekend where you do the things that you need to do in order to be ready for summer. Remember that.

But this isn’t a weekend for remembering that, it’s a weekend for remembering those who paid the price so that we could worry more about the weather than anything else. Will it rain this weekend? Probably. Does it really matter? Not really. Don’t forget those two things- it’s a dress rehearsal for summer and it’s really a time to pay respects to those who made our lives so very, unbelievably, easy.

It’s also the weekend where you’ll find the new issue of Summer Homes For City People. Pick up a copy or three. Put them in your guest bedrooms. Read them. Discover the errors that escaped my proofreading. There will be plenty of them, I’m sure of it. I hope you enjoy the new issue, and I hope you’ll patronize the intelligent businesses that saw fit to advertise in the issue.

For now, take a breath. We’re on the other side of that miserable, petulant winter, and we deserve whatever good things are coming our way. This weekend, it’ll be fun. Enjoy it. And hopefully I’ll see you at the lake.

Market Cycles
David Curry

Market Cycles

It pains me to write about the market on this blog. During the earlier times of these writings, I could write and write and only some buyers and sellers would pay attention. Now I write and write and other agents pull my insights and commentary and adopt them as their own. My selfishness objects to this. But there’s no way to combat it, unfortunately, aside from a fatal paywall. No, this information might be my proprietary blend, formulated only after decades at this helm and distilled by the fire of many market cycles, but once I write it it’s free. Other agents who find their market insights from this blog, you’re welcome for what follows.

To understand this market, you must understand the macro functions of a generic real estate market. First and foremost to that understanding is the awareness that people, en masse, do not buy or sell based on personal circumstances, or their personal economy. They buy based on confidence and they sell based on fear. There is nothing else. In 2008 a homebuyer on Geneva Lake bought a lakefront house on the exact day the market topped. In 2011 he sold it on the exact day the market bottomed. His personal finances between those dates changed very little. The only thing that changed was his perception of the market, and that perception started with confidence and ended in fear. All other commentary related to the movement of markets is nuance.

This is why corn-field subdivisions in 2006 sold with violent fervor and then died with a silent dirge in 2012. This is why those same cornfields are selling now at a furious pace, for prices that far exceed any market top of 2007. $500k for a cornfield ranch? Sure! Why does this buyer buy for $500k now when she could have bought for $340k in 2012? Has her income increased commensurate? We know that interest rates have risen since then, so that isn’t the catalyst. We know that the job market in greater Walworth County isn’t welcoming Google or Facebook anytime soon. So why the rush now in the heat of competition when there was only silence back when value was literally everywhere? Confidence and fear.

Now that you understand this, consider the 2019 buyer. This is not a uniform buyer, by the way. There are three sorts of buyers in the market this morning, the morning of my birthday. Our first buyer is the scared buyer. This is the buyer who was afraid to buy in 2006 because the market was too hot. He was afraid to buy in 2012 because the market was too cold. And he’s afraid to buy now because he feels that it is, once again, too hot. This is what market cycles do, they go from hot to cold, repeatedly, with various stops along the way. This buyer doesn’t like 2019. He wishes it was 2014. He wished, in 2014, that it was 2012. In 2012, he was terrified. This is a buyer who fails to understand real estate and its purpose, and instead wishes to time the market with the hope of immediate and lasting gains. This is the buyer who wouldn’t buy Apple at $8 because IBM.

The other buyer is the feverish buyer. This is the frantic buyer. The buyer who is so whipped up by her own confidence and by the confidence of her cheerleading agent that she has no choice but to buy. Bad house in a bad location for a bad price? SOLD! This buyer can’t wait. Won’t wait. To suggest that better inventory might be coming next week is to suggest pause, and pause will not be tolerated. This buyer is motivated by confidence, by personal economy, by haste. I want to hate this buyer, because this generally isn’t the smart of sophisticated buyer that chooses to work with me, but in reality, I understand this buyer. This is a buyer that knows summer is coming, and that buyer wants to spend it in a better place. That buyer wants this scene so badly she’s willing to rush into it to secure it. This buyer skews markets. This buyer prints albatrosses. This buyer is what every open-house holding agent prays for. Walk this way, young lady.

And then there is the other sort of 2019 buyer. This buyer understands that the market is hot. He understands that prices are higher than they were two years ago. He understands that 2012 was a good time to buy, but he wasn’t in the market then. But this is a buyer who is neither terrified of the future, nor will he sloppily rush to secure it. This is a buyer who understands, even in this cycle of low inventory and high competition, that value still exists. It is still out there. It is present, even this morning, with limited inventory and incredible buyer activity. There are cracks and there are properties that find their way into them. Deals will be had, or maybe they won’t.

To each of these buyers I would suggest the market is indeed hot. Not as hot as the fanatic buyer would suggest and not as dangerous as the regretful buyer would insist. This market is hot. Undoubtedly hot. To buy in 2019 is to entertain some sort of premium. The cycle is getting old, but is it spent? I do not think it is. There is a market trend that is presenting routinely and blatantly, and that trend has everything to do with the state of Illinois. Not the State, mind you, but the state. The pending income tax and constant property tax increases are not a good thing for our market. To suggest that they are is insane. But is a diminished Illinois bad for Lake Geneva? Is an Illinois that has yet to see a tax increase that it isn’t willing to consider a fatal prospect for the vacation home market that lives and dies with the residents of this great state? The answer, it seems, is no.

Would I prefer Illinois to grow and expand and usher in an era of prosperity, free of the shackles of politicians who find office by fostering resentment between classes? Of course. That would be ideal. But in spite of the current tax climate, Lake Geneva is thriving. Why? Well, it’s because of that negative climate. See, times were, a junior associate might live in Lakeview with his new bride. They’d enjoy their time there, but as they matured and as their incomes grew, they’d look for the upgrade. They’d look to Winnetka, maybe, or Lincoln Park. They’d look to move from that condo and to a single family. Or they’d look to find a bigger residence on a higher floor. Something better. Then, after they made that move and their personal economies continued to grow, they’d move again. A few years later. Or maybe a decade later, still, they’d move. Upward and onward, to something better. In case you weren’t aware, in real estate, something better is generally more expensive. The cycle would continue until the time came to downsize, and retire to a winter spent in Naples.

Today, I see the cycle changing. Buyers see the illiquid suburban manse and they want nothing to do with it. They see the pending property tax burden and they do not want to embrace it. But they are still growing financially and they still long for something else. So instead of purchasing that next house, that bigger condominium, that adjacent unit, they’re taking their housing dollars out of state. They’re still earning at a fabulous clip, but they’re not wanting to reinvest into the Illinois problem. Why go long in illiquid real estate that may or may not be taxed at a rapidly accelerating rate? That’s the question, and they’re answering it by bringing those unspent housing dollars to Lake Geneva. They’re investing them in market where the return will likely be financial but will also be personal. They’re investing in their families. In themselves. They’re keeping their housing footprint reasonable in Illinois and they’re expanding it here. Want to know why our market is thriving in spite of Illinois? This is why.

I expect the trend to continue into the foreseeable future. The cycle will ultimately pause, and at that point we’ll re-ignite the cycle where fear breeds fear, and the weaker hands will be flushed. But until then, and again after that ultimate, some-day-softening what happens? Lake Geneva thrives.

PS. Do I think full time residents are going to leave Illinois for Wisconsin? No, I don’t. If you own a house in Crystal Lake and you pay $10k in property taxes on your $300k home, let’s suppose you rightfully hate that and want to move to Wisconsin. In Lake Geneva, that $300k home will have a $7k tax bill. Your kids are in soccer and you commute to Schaumburg every day for work. Will you uproot your family and your life to save $3k per year? The answer should be, and will be, no. If you said yes, then you’re not thinking clearly.

Countdown
David Curry

Countdown

It’s spring break, and everyone is gone. To the mountains. To the beach. To a different place with its own brand of monotony. In the mountains, it’s snowing again. Powder Day, the flat-brimming locals shout. But it’s more of a lazy shout, if there is such a thing. On the beach, more shells. Here’s one that looks like my dog, says some old lady, as she tucks it into her sack full of other shells that also look like her dog. It’s another place this week for many, a break from the monotony of our early spring, to enjoy the monotony of another place.

But while everyone is playing and traveling, I know that there’s something serious on the horizon. Memorial Day Weekend. It’s nine weeks from this Friday. It’s not going to be a normal Friday, that’s for sure. It’ll be you, your office, your co-workers, and there will be a decidedly pronounced difference in attitudes on that day. Some will have an energy, a desire, optimism. Others will behave the same way they did the week before and the week before. For some, that Friday matters. For others, it means only the turning of a calendar, from one season to another, unofficially.

The decision whether or not that Friday matters is yours, and yours alone. The market today is humming with activity, and while I particularly enjoy the activity on the lakefront, each segment of our market is bustling. There is no segment left behind this spring, each price range and housing category finding buyers and fielding offers. You needn’t be robustly rich to enjoy a weekend at the lake. So long as a $90k condo in Geneva National is in your range, you’re in play.

There are pending sales throughout our market, no matter if it’s a $198k cottage in Country Club Estates, or a lakefront estate on the North Shore of Fontana for $7.395MM. The best news for our spring market is that inventory is increasing, albeit slowly. New inventory in any category is a positive, as this market features considerable in-trading amongst vacation home owners. A new lakefront for $3.5MM is good, because it very well may free up a new listing of a $700k cottage with a boatslip. That boat slip property will be great to list, because an owner of a condo at Vista Del Lago might be looking to switch over to a single family vacation home. Any inventory is good inventory, as it lubricates the gears that churn this market forward.

For now, you have a decision to make. If you’re sitting in your office thinking about summer, this is fine. But if those summer thoughts lead you only to a Saturday rooftop dinner and a Sunday morning brunch line, then you’re not thinking as clearly as I had hoped. Dream of summer. Dream of that Friday, nine weeks from this one, but make the decision to make this summer different. I’m here to help, if only you’ll let me.

Above, the divine porch at 434 Oakwood in Fontana. Just sold last week for $1,150,000.

Lake Houses
David Curry

Lake Houses

Certain phrases elicit certain reactions. For instance. If I tell my wife to “calm down”. The reaction is something I can predict with startling accuracy. If my son is bothering me and I tell him that he is banned from his xbox, he’ll react in the same apoplectic manner each and every time. And if I read that someone says they don’t “need a lake house”, my reaction will escalate far beyond that of my wife having been told to calm down and my son having been banned from gaming. You don’t need a lake house? Pfft.

The latest round of this profanity was uttered by a well-intentioned homeowner in a recent Crain’s article. The person owns a home in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. The house is for sale. When a house is for sale, the owners grasp at straws to describe just what it is that makes their house more special than the others. Better than the others. Unique and rare, that’s what their house is. In the case of this gentleman he said that he never felt the need for a lake house, because this house, located on Lake Michigan, is his lake house. It’s a primary home and a lake house all in one, with one tax bill and one landscaping bill. It’s tremendous win. Or so he thinks.

Before I blast off into a state of discontent, I must remind myself that this guy means well. He’s just trying to sell his house, and that’s something that I can understand and appreciate. But in trying to sell his house he has reinforced a myth, and it’s the myth that I find unconscionable. The myth says that a house on or near water is a lake house. A lake house is a lake house, a lake is a lake, a view is a view. In this, homes near water are all the same. Be the home near a great big lake, a tiny little lake, or this, our magnificent lake. Homes are homes, lakes are lakes, and this guy has his lake house. For terrible and irreversible shame.

Yes, you could work your way up through the minor leagues and find yourself standing on the mound, about to hurl a heater in the first inning of your league championship game. You could do that. Or you could just buy a ticket in the bleachers and eat popcorn while you watch the game. In this scenario both people find themselves in the stadium on game day, under the same sun and staring at the same green, hatch-mowed grass. Why put in all that effort to be the pitcher when you can just buy a ticket and enjoy the same game?

This is what it’s like to own a lake house on the big lake, on either side of the big lake. And this is the primary and most significant difference between Lake Geneva and that big lake. The big lake is beautiful. It’s nice to look at. I appreciate it for the inland ocean that it is. I look forward to one day holding the Western states ransom as they wish to stick their straws into our big lake. But to ascribe lake house abilities to a home on that lake is simply an error. The difference between Lake Geneva and Lake Michigan? The ability to use the lake.

If you want to tie a boat in a harbor and drive home to your lake house, I suppose that’s up to you. If you’d prefer to have a lake house with a view of water and no means to use that water, that’s again, like your opinion, man. But if you’d like a lake house situated above that water where the water itself is the weekend, then that’s why you come here. If you’d like your boat waiting for you at the end of your lawn, tethered to your private, white pier, then you should be here. If you’d like to see sunrises and sunsets, this is your place. If you want to ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon and fish in the evening, all without leaving your own property, then you come here. A lake house isn’t really a lake house unless it lets you live in a way that indulges in the adjacent lake. Swim, boat, fish, ski, sail. This is what a Lake Geneva lake house will offer you. If you’re only interested in a lake house that offers you a great view and nothing else, you might as well just move to Evanston.

Rosati’s Pizza Review
David Curry

Rosati’s Pizza Review

More than fifty years ago, in a suburb of Chicago, a member of the Rosati family opened a pizzeria. Years later, a franchise model was born, and Rosati’s Pizza expanded throughout Illinois, the Midwest, and beyond. Today, there are nearly 200 Rosati’s locations. But that doesn’t concern me, because I didn’t even want to eat lunch at Rosati’s yesterday. Oak Fire was my aim, but Oak Fire’s website said they were open, their menu placard outside the restaurant said they were open, the guy inside walking around seemed to indicate that they might be open, but the door was locked. Improvise, adapt, overcome.

I thought of two or three other pizza places after Oak Fire and before Rosati’s, but those places would only open later in the day for dinner service. Pizza, it seems, is seen as a dinner item, which is silly. With the history of my day in place and the history of Rosati’s understood, I pulled into the parking lot and met a friend for lunch.

I had never darkened the door of Rosati’s. Not this one, not any one. The Lake Geneva location is adjacent the Sherwin Williams paint store, just a bit West of the Highway 120/50 intersection, behind the Taco Bell. The location is not ideal, but it works. The interior of the restaurant is decorated like the basement rec room of a Schaumburg tudor in 1996. Chicago Bears and Bulls memorabilia, along with a few token Packers pieces covered the walls. A life size cutout of Michael Jordan and another of a younger Brett Favre kept watch over the dining room.

Don’t confuse Rosati’s with a normal sit-down establishment. This is a fast food restaurant. The tables are covered in wood grain formica. The chairs are the sort you’d stack tall after a church service. There’s nothing here memorable, nothing that sets any sort of mood. This is a place for eating. At 12:30 pm on a Tuesday there were a scant few tables occupied when I walked up to the counter to place my order.

The large cheese pizza was 16 inches, the same size as the large at The Next Door Pub. The menu said the pizza was $16.99. The special, scribbled on a dry-erase board near the entrance, said that a Tuesday large cheese + 1 topping pizza was just $13.99. Their version of “supreme” is called Super Supreme and features opinions, peppers, mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni, and black olives. I ordered the pizza half cheese, half super supreme, minus the black olives because those are disgusting no matter what anyone says. The order-taker struggled with my order.

The way I saw it, she had a few different options for my bill. She could consider my order as the cheese special at $13.99 and add on a fee for the half that was super supreme. Or she could charge me $16.99 and add a charge for the super supreme half. Or she could charge me for the super supreme, and that would be that. The latter option seemed the wrong one, but that’s what she chose. I paid $21.49 for a Super Supreme that was half cheese. I was wounded. But I paid the tab, tipped her for her self-inflicted trouble, and sat down at a table near Brett Favre. It was 12:36.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited. I thought the wait was too long, especially for a chain restaurant that should, at this late date in their business history, have the art of quick pizza making well refined. I also thought of how I received the Next Door Pub pizza quickly, and that turned out to be fatal speed, so I waited. Thirty minutes after I ordered, the pizza was brought to the table. It was large, greasy, well browned, and cut tavern style. It looked pretty good.

And it was pretty good. The sauce wasn’t super sweet but it had nice flavor, the cheese was ample and spotted with browning from the hot oven, the crust crunchy, at least at first. The crust was thin, but it wasn’t particularly good. There was a school cafeteria vibe with the crust. It didn’t flop as terribly as the Next Door Pub rare crust, but that’s a low hurdle to clear. Toppings were applied with a heavy hand, and the cheese was thick, but not so much that it was a burden. It was good because I was hungry, but was it something unique, something worthy of praise? No, it wasn’t. Still, we ate the pizza and were satisfied.

Will I go to Rosati’s again for pizza? No, I won’t. The pizza was fine. But we’re not trying to find fine. We do fine really well here. We’re looking for outstanding. Rare. We’re searching for a winner, and in a crowd full of pizza, Rosati’s doesn’t deserve any special consideration.

Rosati’s Pizza

240 Edwards Boulevard, Lake Geneva

4.2/10

$21.49 for a half cheese/half super supreme thin crust pizza  (note: there are several styles of pizza available here- deep dish, double crust, etc)

2019 State Of The Market
David Curry

2019 State Of The Market

Managing Directors, Those Bored and Successful, My Wife and Children, My Mother Who Reads These Posts, and my Fellow Lake Geneva Admirers:

We meet electronically this morning at a moment of unlimited potential. As we begin a new year, I sit here ready to work with you to achieve historic breakthroughs for your family, that prized collection of individuals who count on you to ignite their weekend, lakeside dreams. Our fellow Midwesterners are watching us now, hoping that we will not vacation as two parties, some seeking solace on these shimmering shores, and others still wandering blindly towards a great big, unusable lake in a lesser Eastern state, but as one Nation, united in the desire to spend weekends splashing and playing. The contrast I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda, not an agenda for those in Winnetka and another for those in Hinsdale. It is the agenda of the American people, those who have come here, weary of their work and seeking rest.

 There is a new opportunity in American vacation homes, if only we have the courage to seize it. Victory is not winning the bid. Victory is winning the bid on the right house, on the right lake, at the right price. This year, we will recognize an important anniversary that shows us the majesty of this great Lake Geneva mission. This year, we mark 23 years since the start of what I would call a most illustrious Real Estate career. Should I have gone to college and law school? Of course I should have, but that doesn’t matter now. It’s too late to worry about that when the promise of summer is so near.

Today, a mother from Buffalo Grove will log on to her computer, and she’ll stumble upon this website and her eyes will be opened to the possibility of a Lake Geneva vacation home. This is the promise of America, yes, but it’s the further promise of Lake Geneva. And when this mother searches and strives and brings her family to the lake this summer, and oh so many summers after, this is when the dream of my father, and of her father will have been realized. Of course, that assumes her father dreamt of this in the way that my father did, but still. It’s in these people, the city worker and the mother from Buffalo Grove and my father and her father that combine to make the state of the Lake Geneva market strong.

The results of this work, of the street plower dutifully fulfilling his pledge, and of the mother looking and then buying the most perfect lake house, is that our market has never been stronger. We have never been stronger.  We own the Midwest vacation home market, and it is all but assured that the coming year will be as bright as the years that preceded it. No, brighter, as if that could be possible.  We do not shut off our lights, or turn away any weary travelers just because we are content in our own strength, proud of our resilience and upper bracket liquidity. Instead we offer benevolence to the lake weary, to those who toil and labor in cities and in suburbs, and we offer them shelter because that is what we do and this is who we are.  How can we call ourselves Americans if we do not encourage those with the means to lay down roots near our shores? The only wall that Lake Geneva needs is made of Hydrangea, and it blooms as bright as the faces of our sun-kissed children.

The question for us today is actually only for you. It is not for you if you’re content with your vacation home ownership here. If you splash your way through every summer, this is not a charge that you need to consider because you have already passed this greatest test. The question today is for those who sit at their computers, who sit on their couches, who spend Saturday wondering what Sunday will bring even though you know it just brings a long line and then brunch.  Maybe a stroller ride through an insufferable park.  The question is what, exactly, are you doing? Why are you allowing a most un-American complacency to drag down your weekends, when you know that we’re here- the city worker, polishing the streets that we’d like you to drive over, and the mother, picking up corn at the farmer’s market in the morning to cook it lakeside in the evening. We are here, working and playing and living in a most amazing fashion, even while you sit there in that same new chair, obstructing your own path in life simply because you’re scared to venture into the unknown.  Do you not dream our same watery dreams? Do you not wish for your own American dream?

But this isn’t the unknown, my friends, this is America, yes, the most pure version of it. This is America, if the entirety of it would be washed in clean water, surrounded by a lush green shore, where every family gets a boat in every slip and some gas in that boat and a few hours of leisure. This is what we offer, and in the coming months you must make a decision to join us or forever get out of our way. In God We Trust, yes but do we not also trust in blue water and soft summer skies? Do we not trust in weekends that are different than weekdays? In summer that is different than fall?  We can make progress this year, together, but we cannot do this without your cooperation. We can lead you to the water but we cannot make you swim. We cannot simply urge you to join us if you will not make even a modest effort. This isn’t what it is to be an American, to lie and lounge in city apartments and in suburban backyards, this isn’t the sense of adventure that our fore-bearers wished for us. Do you not aspire to join us in our greatness?

But today is for the laborer. The partner and the founder. The director and the vice president.  They rise and they work, and they rise and they work. They wake on Saturday and they pretend that this day is somehow different. They rise and think that a Lake Geneva vacation home isn’t for them, because it hasn’t ever been for them. That this dream is unattainable. They huddle in their darkest corners, holding tight to their money that they’ve worked so hard to earn, and they fear the things that might happen if they let some of it go. They live as though their pedigree is in question, as though they cannot consider Lake Geneva because of its long enduring reputation as a place for the very best among us. I assure you today, as I will assure you again tomorrow, that Lake Geneva is for everyone, for every man, woman and child, for anyone who wakes on a Saturday and says, “I’m bored, let’s go to the lake”.

And so I make this decree, by executive order, under the authority bestowed upon me by myself, I hereby demand every vacation home seeker of some means to at least consider a Lake Geneva vacation home.  Your complacency cannot thrive under this bright lakeside sun, and so this command today by me, your market leading agent, shall be followed otherwise the willing dissenters risk being labeled enemy combatants and foist into the darkness of a Pure Michigan weekend.  We may disagree on the course of value, or on the benefits of one shore over the other, or on which restaurant is worthy of our breakfasting intentions and which restaurants are not, but we can agree that Lake Geneva is the place to be. In fact, it always has been, and it always will be. If we can summon the courage to live in a way that finds our weekends at the lake, then we can achieve a new standard of living for the twenty-first century and beyond. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless Lake Geneva and no place else.

Lake Geneva Winter
David Curry

Lake Geneva Winter

I think it’s cute that the city of Lake Geneva is installing an ice rink this winter. The ice rink will complement the ice castles that are currently being built on the beach. When Winterfest rolls around, the city will be bustling with every sort of wintery thing imaginable. I’m glad for the city that they’ve decided to use some of their enormous budget on things that actually improve the experience that is Lake Geneva. But with that acknowledgement comes criticism, which will be something that they write on my tombstone, assuming I’ve prepaid for the inscription.  In the City of Lake Geneva, it’s amateur hour.

Or amateur season, to be more exact.  We know we do summer well. We have no choice.  Well, we do it mostly well. The ridiculous boat parade that accompanies the Venetian Fireworks might be one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen. It only seems ok if you squint and imagine you’re at Lake of the Ozarks, or the Dells, or some damned up river in Texas.  But aside from that, we do summer well. Fall is also handled with care, and handled rather well. The leaves will turn whether we wish them to or not.

But in the winter, this is when the wheels fall off. We’re making strides, don’t be confused. The ice rink is a nice idea. It is. It reminds me of the good times I had on the Williams Bay ice rink back in the early 1990s. What fun was had down there. We’d play hockey and lose the puck in the snowy walls that made up the edges of the rink. We’d skate and catch a rogue stone with our blades and crash into the ice.  Once, I checked my friend Eric so hard that he walked home and didn’t talk to me for a couple of days. It was a lot of fun, during a simpler time.

This isn’t that time. This isn’t a simple time, not by any stretch. It’s a complicated time with complicated problems that call for complicated solutions. The city is building an ice rink. The rink will have a floor of some sort, some short walls. I’ll bet they’ll string up some lights to make it look pretty, for the two or three days that the ice will be smooth. Once they open up the fire hydrant and flood the rink, they’ll hope the water freezes and cross their fingers that it stays frozen. This is what we did in Williams Bay when we were kids. We had no other choice. The city of Lake Geneva has another choice.

If you want to know where winter is done well, look to the mountains. I’m tired of the mountains, personally, but they know how to capitalize on their seasons. They also know that when you build an ice rink in your resort town, you build a permanent rink and you refrigerate it. Further, you run the zamboni over it once or twice a day. Yes, this sounds like more cost. It sounds like more effort. But what are we if not a destination worthy of some effort? If we’re going to try to make improvements, shouldn’t we really, actually try?  How can you effectively market an attribute if the attribute is only going to function on the whim of the weather?

I’m glad there’s an ice rink coming. I’m glad there are ice castles crowing. I’m just not sure that any of it is going to work, assuming we’ll have a normal winter that features a pattern of freeze and thaw, of snow and rain, of clouds and sun.  I’ve learned some things in my life, and those things have cost me on every level. Don’t try to save money on everything. If you’re building a house, don’t try to do the painting yourself. If you’re remodeling your kitchen, don’t skimp on the appliances. And if you’re building an ice rink, build an ice rink.

Lake Geneva YTD Performance
David Curry

Lake Geneva YTD Performance

When you’re part of an industry that puts significant focus on calendar year performance, you tend to look up in late October and realize you’ve run out of time. In the same way, I have a theory that I gladly share with dinner guests and random acquaintances, but this theory has to do with life and not real estate. The two, no matter what your agent says, are not the same. My theory supposes that when a man, or a woman, is in their late 30s, they are no longer about to be something. They are no longer going to do something. They are no longer on their way to some different goal. In your late 30s, when you look in the mirror, you likely are what you are. Some people find this depressing. I find it oddly comforting. When the 2018 real estate market looked itself in the mirror this morning it wasn’t about to be something different. At this late date, 2018 is what it’s going to be.

But what has 2018 been, exactly? When the year began, I was worried. Worried about the stability of the stock market, worried about inventory, and slightly worried about interest rates. If the first two caused were gaping knife wounds of worry, the last one was a paper cut, and not one of those finger tip ones, either. If sellers wouldn’t sell into this market, then buyers would slowly lose patience, and they’d either jump ship and run with their tail between their legs to Michigan or some other terrible place, or they’d just hunker down in whatever it was that they already owned and wait for the inventory to arrive. At this point in 2018, the inventory did arrive, but it didn’t exactly satisfy the masses of buyers.

Still, inventory presented and then inventory sold. Some aged inventory sold as well, and it this late date in 2018 we’ve closed 20 lakefront homes with three more under contract as of this morning. The only three lakefront homes under contract (per MLS) are all my listings, which is nice. For context on that lakefront performance, consider YTD 2017 we had closed 24 lakefront homes. Does that mean the market has slipped? Of course not. It just means 2017 offered more inventory to choose from. The better context is to look back to 2012, the year that marked the low point in our recent cycle. YTD 2012 we had closed just 16 lakefront homes, and that had little to do with inventory and everything to do with worry.

The broad vacation home market, those homes with lake access with typical pricing between $200k and $1.7MM, has had itself a solid year as well. Inventory deficiencies plague this segment as well, but in spite of that concern we’ve managed to close 58 lake access homes in 2018. An additional 12 are under contract as of this morning per MLS.  The condo market is fairly similarly well, with 31 YTD sales of condominiums possessing lake access to Geneva. This is a vague measurement, as it includes some bits of inventory that I wouldn’t normally consider when adding up these totals (like dockominiums, etc), but it matters if we’re just assessing the overall volume performance of the segment. YTD 2017 printed 34 sales, and YTD 2012 had closed 30.  Keep in mind, this is including Abbey Springs and others, so it isn’t a pure measure of the lakefront condo market performance.

Speaking of that lakefront condo market, it’s moving quite nicely at the moment. There are two lakefront condominiums under contract as of this morning, leaving just 8 true lakefront condo units on market.  As we steam towards the end of 2018, expect to see some sellers following the move of my Bay Colony seller, as price reductions hope to tempt buyers towards a few pieces of overlooked inventory.  My Bay Colony listing, by the way, is now $799k, with a slip and likely the most high end interior space of any condominium on Geneva lake, excepting Stone Manor, of course.

Expect inventory to remain low through the end of the year, but don’t be surprised to see some new bits and pieces come to market over the next 30 days. Price reductions should increase over the coming two or three weeks, and the market will wind down by printing much of the remaining pending sales. 2018 has been a good  year, and looks to leave us staring at 2019 with an eye on the stock market, and the hope for new inventory.

Above, my Bay Colony offering. $799k for so much lakeside luxury. 

Vista Del Lago Sells
David Curry

Vista Del Lago Sells

After a market downturn occurs, we must set our aim towards the goal of complete and thorough recovery.  If that goal is to return a specific market segment to full health, then there are several steps that must be followed. There is no shortcut to this health, and you cannot out-volume a market issue any more effectively than I can out-lift my horrible, no good diet.  If the market was bad and we wish the market to be good, then the steps must be followed.

The first step is to weed out any weak hands. Financially troubled owners have a tendency to drag on a market, negating any market gains with the constant, worrisome threat of foreclosure. If volume is printing but prices are still falling, this is generally acceptable, and will, over some period of time, work out in favor of the ownership. But if there are pieces of weak ownership that have the ongoing possibility of some form of distressed sale, this creates market drag that volume alone cannot overcome. This scenario occurred in the South Shore Club in the early years of this current decade, and the only way the SSC moved forward was by eliminating those trouble spots, which unfortunately only occurs after an owner has lost their home to the bank.

With the weak spots identified and fixed, then we need volume. Plenty of volume. We need sales in all price sectors within that segment. Some prices will be low, and we cannot be too concerned about this. If an average price in the segment is $500k, and over a particular duration there are two sales around $400k for every sale around $500k, that’s not a big deal. It’ll feel awful, but remember, the goal is not immediate health but rather a path towards it. It’s painful to watch low sales print when you know they’re creating an issue for those who wish for higher sales, but  I never said this path was going to be fun.

With the weak owners flushed and the volume on the rise, the third step is bright spots of higher valuations. A sale here and there over the expected average of the segment. If we’re in this $500k range, then we’ll need to see some sales print higher- $525k, $550k. There will still be lower sales, sure, but the momentum is achieved by raising the expected ceiling.  Higher sales beget higher sales, and all it takes is one or two of these sales to move a market higher.

Step four is the strengthening of volume. We need more sales. More and more sales. New listings, shorter Days On Market. Movement, that’s what we need now. Liquidity is important to both establish the market pattern and introduce new, energized ownership to a segment. The reason new owners matter is because they tend to make improvements. Remodel the kitchen, update the bathrooms. New appliances, new tile, new paint. This shows a potential buyer that they’re surrounded by neighbors who value what it is that they own. Increased volume is vital to return a market to health.

The last step is a tightening of inventory.  True price gains cannot be realized if there is ample, sufficient inventory. We need limited inventory, tight conditions. We need buyers asking about product in that particular segment, be it a specific association, condominium, or price range. Without this last, crucial step, a market cannot return to full health. If you doubt these steps, consider each and every step has occurred in sequence within the South Shore Club over the past eight years. The good news for the local condominium market is that Vista Del Lago appears to be following the same, successful path.

Last week, I closed on another four bedroom unit at Vista Del Lago. I sold one in May for $520k, and I sold this recent one for $515k. Both sales represent meaningful volume for this association, and both sales prove that Vista is on the path towards full health. If you’re a condo buyer on Geneva, you generally have options with two bedrooms. Some association have three bedroom units, and some have four bedrooms. But the four bedroom condominiums tend to be pricey, located in higher-end associations like East Bank. Vista offers four bedroom units for $520k, and as long as families want a view of the lake, a slip, and a place to sleep, Vista will have a market.  Speaking of the market, there are only three available units at Vista this morning, and none of those are four bedroom units.  Vista isn’t yet finished with this plan, but as you can see, it’s well on its way.

Lake Geneva Video
David Curry

Lake Geneva Video

It’s been three years since I had my homepage video filmed. That was a terrific video, if I do say so myself. But this last week’s weather was so perfect I decided to have a new homepage video created. I hope you like it.

 

 

Bonnie Brae Boathouse
David Curry

Bonnie Brae Boathouse

For each of us, there is something unique in our story, some important event in our past, or in the past of our parents, or our grandparents, or our great aunts and uncles, that led us to this place.  For the Ryerson Family, the events were rather curious. As the Great Chicago Fire raced through the city, decimating businesses, destroying homes, killing indiscriminately and ruining lives, there was but one large city lumberyard spared from the carnage: The lumberyard owned by the Ryerson Family. When the rebuilding process began, one family was prepared to supply those efforts. And when the ash settled and the city was restored, the Ryerson Family had not only played a major role in those efforts, they were rewarded with lasting riches.

Martin Ryerson was the son of the lumberyard owner, and as a son of privilege he attended CPS before ultimately graduating from Harvard Law School. At age 25, he was married and working his law practice, content in his city life. At age 34, his father died, leaving him the family business and making him one of the richest men in Chicago. His interest in education and civic matters led him to help found the University of Chicago, where he played a key roll in the design of the campus and served for decades on the board. The Ryerson Physics Laboratory still operates to this day. Due to his involvement with the University, he visited Lake Geneva to tour the brand new Yerke’s Observatory. After that visit to the lake he was hooked, and the same year purchased the property that would become known as Bonnie Brae (Pretty Hillside). At one point, the estate measured  nearly 100 acres and possessed more than 1200 feet of lakefrontage on the north shore.  If you think impulse buys are some sort of new thing, created by our impatient generation, Martin Ryerson would quickly disagree.

A year after purchasing the property and initiating a large scale, multi-building construction project, Martin turned his attention to the water and hired the Racine Boat Company to build his 72′ steam yacht.  At the time, the residents of Geneva would take the train from the city to the lake, and board their elegant steam powered yachts which would chauffeur the owners to their lakefront homes.  Hathor, one of a small handful of original steamers still on Geneva to this day, played host to elite society, including Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Harvey Firestone, and a fairly well known impressionist painter by the name of Claud Monet.

With the addition of Hathor, Martin was in need of a place to store her, so he built a boathouse at the water’s edge, to the West of the main house, on a remarkably level section of lakefront.   For the next 34 years, the Ryerson’s would spend their fanciful lives traveling, building up the cultural scene of Chicago, and relaxing lakeside at their Bonnie Brae.   It was at the lake where Ryerson would die, at the age of 75.  Upon his death, 90 percent of his wealth was given away to the Field Museum, The Chicago Art Institute, and his cherished University of Chicago. Some time later, the large estate was divided, and one four acre parcel with 185′ of level frontage and a deeply wooded hillside was assigned to his original boathouse.

Over the years, the boathouse was renovated into a single family home. Additions over recent years made for a proper master suite.  An extra garage was built for storage. Bathrooms were updated with marble. Today, the original Bonnie Brae boathouse, with that long wooded drive off of Snake Road,  is offered for sale. $3,895,000 for 185 feet of frontage, 4.3+ acres of fabulous depth, and a 4,742 square foot house that is one of the last remaining boathouses on Geneva Lake. Martin Ryerson was friends with Monet and the Rockefellers. He studied in Paris and London. He founded universities and lasting civic institutions. But most of all he was just a guy who loved spending time at the lake, swimming off his pier and bragging about the speed of his boat. Today,  you can own his boathouse, and you’d be wise to act as quickly as he did in 1897.

 

Lake Geneva Realtors
David Curry

Lake Geneva Realtors

There’s nothing that makes me hate my chosen profession more than leafing through a local glossy magazine. There are lots of glossies here, most notably that Summer Homes For City People glossy. That’s a heck of a magazine, but you knew I’d say that.  In spite of my magazine being the only magazine of importance and relevance, there are others that persist. I made the mistake of thumbing through one of these magazines over the weekend, and what I discovered left me weary for this business of real estate.

The issue isn’t Realtors, themselves. They’re fine, really. The issue is advertising. The issue is what we choose to say about ourselves in the hope that someone will believe us. The glossy I read through featured heaps and heaps of advertisements for brokers and their Realtors, and I thought I might lend a bit of MLS based fact checking to the advertised claims.  I’m all for self promotion (see: this blog, my magazine, my life, etc), but there’s a reason why my self promotion is heavy on specifics: I want to be taken seriously.

Without further ado and in no particular order, the ads I stumbled upon:

One claimed 33 reasons why a brokerage is super amazing. I did some research this morning and found that the Walworth County average closed sales (2018) for those 33 particular reasons was $1.67MM. For perspective and context, during 2016/2017 I averaged over $4MM in sales, per month.

Another ad, this one really fancy looking. The agent has been closing lakefront deals on Geneva, since quite a long time ago. Some MLS searching to provide background on the advertisement revealed that indeed this agent has put together single family lakefront deals on Geneva. Four of them, in total.  I, also have closed a few lakefronts on Geneva. 48 of them since 2010, and more before that, but alas, I don’t even have an ad in the magazine.

There’s some mention in other ads of agents winning awards from their companies. Watches, gold circles, platinum things. This is nice for these agents and their host companies. One such company gives away a watch the first year you sell $10MM with the company.  I sent an email to the company asking if I’d qualify for 4 watches for 2017 based on my production, of if I’d be capped at just one watch. (I jest)

Ooh, here’s another ad. This one is sleek. Super sleek.  This agent sells lots of houses that afford the lake lifestyle. To review the claim, let’s look through the MLS…. That agent has sold one home with lake access or lakefront on Geneva this year. One.  This does not make for a terrific year, but it does make for a great ad.

There’s no need to go on and on, as I think you have likely grasped my concern. As a consumer in the market you’ll need to figure out which agent you should use to represent you. Sadly, the lakefront market on Geneva is hot, which is attracting more and more agents to the lakefront fray. You can’t blame them, as it’s the biggest pie and everyone longs for a slice. Unfortunately, no matter what the ads say, not every agent is a lakefront specialist. Not every agent has success in specific market segments. If you’re an agent and you do a  terrific job selling in Geneva National, then put that in your ads.  I have a horse farm for sale (it’s amazing, really), near Clinton, Wisconsin. The fact that I have this farm for sale does not make me an Equestrian Property Expert.

This morning, it’s just another reminder, I suppose. If you need an attorney to help with your Last Will, please don’t hire a personal injury attorney. If you need a mechanic to replace your timing belt, don’t drop your car off at the bicycle repair shop. If you need a Lake Geneva area Realtor to help with your purchase or your sale, choose an agent with a pattern of success in the specific segment that has your attention. If you’re looking for a Realtor to assist you in Des Moines or Hinsdale, do the same.

Basswood Lake Geneva
David Curry

Basswood Lake Geneva

A Wednesday reminder that my listing at W4396 Basswood Drive is still available. I just reduced the price of this home to $8,495,000, and it’s now offered at an extreme discount to replacement value. Consider the pending sale of a home in Lake Geneva listed at $14,500,000. Now consider buying this home, renovating it, and being all in for far less than the sale price of that nine year old home. It doesn’t take a genius to make the right moves in this market, it just takes a bit of effort.  Contact me for a private tour of this most lovely estate.

Not The Same
David Curry

Not The Same

I don’t really know exactly how Hamburger Helper works. I assume it’s just a powder mix, with some starch to bind and some salt to flavor. Maybe a dash of onion and garlic powder for good measure. I’m guessing you brown some meat, strain off most of the fat, and then stir in this powder. Give it a bit of time on some heat and it thickens and becomes Hamburger Helper. Maybe you add in macaroni or other noodles, I can’t be sure. But whatever you’d made you can eat it, and if you’re not a snob you can recognize that in spite of its name it tastes ok. It’ll satisfy your hunger, much in the way that a fine Porterhouse steak cooked on the dying embers of a wood fire will accomplish the same. Both are food, both come from a cow, and both will allow you to push away your pangs of hunger. In this, they are the same.

When I eat fish fry and tell the world about it, I get mixed reviews on my reviews. Some people like them. Good one, Dave. Other people shake their head because I just insulted their favorite restaurant. Others still tell me that fried fish isn’t good at all. That it’s not really food.  Unless you’re grilling a fine piece of line caught Tuna or a fat sliver of a Swordfish steak that you’re not really eating fish at all.  But that’s where they’re wrong, because I am eating fish, and it did taste fine, and my hunger was satiated. Would a nicely seasoned, seared piece of fresh Tuna be a finer option? Of course it would, but I was just looking to eat an easy dinner with $14.

This market of ours is causing buyers significant pain, as you know. It’s causing strife and anguish and terrible, terrible bouts of regret. Should you have listened to me and bought that lakefront home in 2013? Obviously. Increasingly, as buyers find little to pick over in this Lake Geneva market of ours, they’re turning to other ideas. To other lakes. Other places. Other states (shudder).  Michigan is better they say. Michigan has antique stores! Michigan has more nuclear power plants and more beach syringes!, they plead.  Do you know what Michstakegan also has? Inventory at lower prices. No one will admit this, but inventory and price drive decisions, and if water is water and a tree is a tree, then some water and a tree anywhere will do.

Maybe it’s not in Michigan, maybe it’s here. Another lake, perhaps. Farther away where the dollar stretches a bit.  Beaver Lake, that’s a nice place. Look how clear the water is! Yes, it’s clear and you just might have two or three feet of it off the end of your brown wooden pier. Maybe Pine Lake, where the water is clear and the shoreline green, where you can sit on your dock (they don’t get piers there, these are ours) and watch nothing go by.  If you’d like to sit in the woods by yourself, Pine Lake is fantastic. If you’re hungry and you want to go to dinner but you’re a recluse now and you’ve forgotten to renew your driver’s license you could shoot a deer and eat it. No one will notice.

There are other options. Lots of them. Anywhere you want to go, options.  If your standard for a lake house involves just a house and a lake, this can be accomplished anywhere. Want to save some money? Go to Tennessee, there are loads of lakes there and wonderful, plucked banjos to provide the soundtrack of your float. Or drive to the Northwoods, like so many do. It’s nice up there. Just plan to leave by 5 pm so you can roll in around midnight. Rainy on Saturday, oh well! You can go take your picture next to a giant wooden fish.

As I stood on a pier last night with the last few bits of sun peaking out around the Observatory’s iconic dome, I breathed the scene in. Soft waves, a gentle breeze, a boat or two slowly plying past heading to their nighttime piers. In the shallows, a Huron plucked around the rocks looking for the minnows that couldn’t escape his beak. In the distance, a sailor sitting stationary, hoping for a few last gasps of wind to bring him back to the pier. There’s something about this place that the uninitiated cannot fully grasp. Something rare. A blend of action and solitude, of peace and motion.  Something unique that other lakes simply cannot attain. You could leave this place in search of a lake that will more generously offer you inventory. They’ll give you nice homes for much less money. They’ll give you some water to swim in, no matter if your bathing suit will slowly turn green from the exposure. You could go to these places. But please don’t you ever mistake their Hamburger Helper for our Porterhouse.

Lake Geneva Market Update
David Curry

Lake Geneva Market Update

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t written as much about individual market segments of late, you’re perceptive. I haven’t.  It isn’t that I haven’t had thoughts, or that the market isn’t doing things I’m noticing and feel like sharing with you, it’s just that the market isn’t really all that fun right now. To be a buyer with some level of contemplative thought isn’t fun. To be a seller who sees the market ripping and roaring excepting your individual house, that isn’t fun. And to be an agent who has to deal with all of this, well, that isn’t fun either. It’s summer and we’re supposed to be having fun. But I’m not, and if you’re a buyer then you’re not. And some sellers aren’t either. This is the summer of our discontent.

The issue is that the inventory is limited. This we know. We knew this last year and we knew it was going to be an issue this year. And it is. Showings on lakefront homes are at all-time-high levels, and it’s not uncommon this summer to see four or five different lakefront showings a week on a lakefront listing.  Offers are plentiful, and just this past week there’s a new contract on an aged bit of South Shore Club inventory listed in the $2.8MM range, and a new contract on an entry level cottage in the Elgin Club in the $1.2MMs.  The other pending lakefront is of the Woodhill property on Basswood listed at $4.5MM. That’s a home that the market perceived to be a tear down, but rumor has it the soon-to-be-owner has chosen to renovate it.

For all of this new activity, there has been just one lakefront closing in the past six weeks. That closing occurred last week when the old Born Free estate on the north shore of Geneva closed for $5.35MM. That property last sold in 2011 for $3.5MM. There were no significant changes made to the property between 2011 and 2018. That’s real appreciation. To further that story, the new owner of that parcel tried in vain to cut the piece into three lots. Thankfully, the township struck that concept down, and the new owner was only able to get 2 lakefront lots out of the 200′ parcel.  When the piece sold last week, the new owner turned around and sold off the vacant 100′ of that lot to a new buyer for a rumored price in the high $2s.

There were six other lake access sales over the past six weeks, including the large stable home in Loramoor. That large property closed for $1.37MM. On a price per square foot measure, which our market doesn’t typically have interest in, that property sold for an unbelievable bargain. But in real life the price was about right for an off-water home (with slip)  in need of some final finishing touches. As with any aged piece of inventory, it’s terrific to see that property no longer on market.  I have several properties pending sale, including my modern off-water home on the south shore, a vacant lot in East Loramoor, and my Woodstone listing that I brought to market just a few weeks ago.

I’ve personally had several lakefront listing appointments in the past month, but all have ended with sellers either choosing to hang on to their homes, or other delays for unknown reasons.  The last several weeks of hot and sunny have provided powerful momentum for buyers who were possibly ambivalent about their purchase before. It’s one thing to be hot and bothered at the lake. At least refreshment is close. It’s another thing entirely to be hot and bothered in the city or suburbs, and that’s brought buyers to the lake in tremendous numbers.  Oh, and there’s a new listing on the lake for $14.5MM. It isn’t my listing, which is unfortunate and terrible. That will test the high end up here, which last printed an $11MM+ sale for 415′ of frontage and 19 acres on Snake Road.

If you’re a buyer in this market, I sympathize with your plight. Low inventory is making for a difficult process, but in spite of this there are still deals to be had. Some sellers are motivated, even while most of the others are not. Find aged inventory and pick at it. Needle it. Consider it. If you’re jumping around from agent to agent you need to stop doing this. Email me. Let me help you understand this market. Let me help you discover patience. The market won’t stay this tight forever. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

(No Fish Fry Review today. I went to the Lake Geneva Yacht Club on Friday night and the fish was overcooked and the potato pancakes blah. This reflects my recent disappointment during my return visit to the Abbey’s Waterfront.)

Summery
David Curry

Summery

My calendar said spring turned to summer last week. The first day of summer, it said, capitalized with an exclamation point. The hardware stores had an ad in the paper, every paper, telling us that it’s summer time and because of this we need things. Grills! Plants! Bee Killer! I was in a hardware store over the weekend when a man walked in with a bee problem. He told the store worker that his bees were out of control. They were in the rocks and around his waterfall.  They were a problem and his children wouldn’t be happy if they were stung, even though no one had been stung just yet.  I kept quiet for a while but ultimately decided to ask if he was certain these were not honey bees, because honey bees are valuable and shouldn’t be choked by a foaming pesticide. He didn’t know. They’re all bees he said. And they’re all going to die. Welcome to Summer.

A woman drove a convertible down the road and across the intersection where I was stopped. There was something going on around the corner, a race maybe. Some bikes zipped past. Numbers painted onto the participants’ arms. So much determination, so much haste. The woman in the convertible didn’t care, she had on her big hat, and I wondered how it stayed attached to her head without blowing away in the open-top-breeze. Pins, maybe. I figured there was a trick, something women know that I don’t. She turned the corner too tight and her wheel clipped the curb, causing the car to bounce and her hat to flop and her neck to whip back like something happened that she couldn’t control. Later, when she’s home she’ll tell her husband that she just can’t understand what happened to that wheel. By then the scrape on her shiny rim will be smudged dark by summer dirt that washed from the spring fields during the last storm.

No one knows when it’s summer more than boaters. You can see the boats now, sitting on trailers and in slips, full of gas and ready. There’s no time like now to boat, at least now that it’s summer. If you have a boat and you own it during summer, what a thrill. Boats in the winter aren’t nearly as much fun. That’s when the bills come due. Winter service, winter storage, winter protection from the winter: $2650. Last year it was $2250, but the economy is better and the labor is tighter so the price has to go up. Boats are like that, a good measure of inflation and of the economy. Need your boat waxed? It’ll cost you $550 during a recession and $825 during a boom. It’s booming now, and the bill was $900. The extra is the Geneva fee. It would have still been $825 in the Chain, but no $75 has been better spent.

It’s raining again. It’s not a spring rain, it’s a summer rain. I’m sure because the weatherwoman said it would be a passing shower, like how it rains at Disney every afternoon. It always amazes me how much rain we can get in the summer and yet when I want precipitation in January so my kids can ski, it’s as dry as the driest of deserts.  It’s dry in the Southwest, and they have purple mountain sunsets there. Come to the Southwest and see our cacti and our purple mountains and our sunsets! There’s nothing like a sunset over a purple mountain with some cacti in the foreground. That’s what they say, but I don’t believe them. Because it’s summer here and our sunsets are better. Once this rain passes I’m sure there will be a better sunset tonight. A summer sunset. The humidity will make the sky dazzle.

The calendar told people it’s summer, and they’re reacting. Boats are boating, sunsets are filling up Instagram. #summervibes, someone writes. Others Like. It’s that time, when summer comes to those who otherwise wouldn’t know. But I know. You know. We know summer has nothing to do with the calendar. Summer arrives when we first feel it on our skin. When the first pier is in, white and sturdy. The first boat pushes through the water from West to East and back again. When that first sunset is no longer visible through the bare branches of winter, but instead hides behind a deep, dark canopy of Oak and Maple. Summer doesn’t start at the end of June unless you’re not paying attention. Summer for me started sometime in May, whether the calendar watchers knew it or not.

Municipal Musings
David Curry

Municipal Musings

Last weekend, it was hot. You know that. I know that. It was super hot. Smoking hot. Summer hot. If you were here, then you were less hot than the other people who chose to stay there. But still, hot. Williams Bay had a big pile of rocks on its lakefront, with some earth moving equipment stacked next to a small stream that I’d like to have moved. If I do anything in this life, it should be that I’ll have that stream moved.  On Memorial Day, Williams Bay had a nice little Memorial Day Parade. The dandelions noticed. The earth moving equipment, sitting idle for the weekend out of respect, noticed. The trees in the beach park, with weeds growing up around them, noticed. Williams Bay was not ready for prime time.

It was Memorial Day Weekend in Fontana, too. The beach was combed, the large pile of sand pushed up to that child-friendly mound. The boulevards were mowed and trimmed. The baseball diamond that has withstood lakefront re-development was mowed, its infield dragged. Someone might have dusted off the bases, I can’t be sure. The Harbor is new now, shiny and better. No matter that the floating piers are awkward still and they slope unnaturally from shore, and there might be a few too many lights, LED or not. But the Harbor was spiffed and the boats were waxed and the infield was dragged. In the boulevards, flowers bloomed.

In Lake Geneva, the road project near the lakefront was completed. The giant potholes that plagued that lakeside stretch of Main Street have been fixed, and just in time. But the yards that were torn to complete this work were only seeded, not sodded. So the dandelions pushed and the grass stalled. The glistening blacktop flanked by messy stretches of straw and netting. Sod would have been nice, considering it would have required such a modest amount. My friend had a sod farm once.  He closed it down and planted corn, because no one wanted to pay him for his fine sod.

What exactly are these lakeside communities? What do they aspire to be? I contend that only one town here knows the answer to that question. Fontana knows what it is, what it wants to be, where it wants to go. It makes the effort. It sees the vision. It understands the market, the clientele, and the visual that they demand. Williams Bay hasn’t a clue. Not a single, tiny clue. There’s an auto-repair shop with constant torque wrenches and a view of the lake. There are three ice cream shops within a 150 yard radius. Most of the shop spaces are for rent, and those that aren’t will be some day. There’s a piece of vacant dirt in the downtown with a FOR SALE sign. For Rent signs litter the surrounding corners.  Williams Bay is a sleepy hamlet, but it’s only sleepy because it doesn’t have a plan.  Without a plan, why get out of bed?

In spite of Fontana’s confidence and Williams Bay’s awkward adolescence, Lake Geneva is the town that truly isn’t sure of itself. On one hand, a dynamic, rare lakefront. Parks, walkways, grass and water. The new walkway over the beach is smart and shows awareness.  The downtown remains idyllic, even if the rents are too damn high and the result is too many vacancies. The downtown is truly the only thing that needs to remain a draw, and there’s no danger of that status changing. But around that special downtown, what exactly is the City of Lake Geneva doing?

A five story chain hotel adjacent its major thoroughfare? Big Box stores of all makes and models littering its primary entrance? Increased revenue from every angle but no decrease in taxes?  Why is it so had to understand what it is that the residents and visitors want? The Wisconsin Dells is a nice enough place, I suppose. If you get married on a Friday and have no time for anything but a two day weekend, then the Dells is nice. Honeymooning at a waterpark, that’s something. But absent that shot-gun wedding, or a carload of 12 year olds headed for a birthday party, who really wants to go to the Dells? Not me. And not the people who call Lake Geneva home, whether that’s a permanent home or a seasonal one.

These lakeside municipalities have made strides in the last decade, but only one has identified its highest and best use. Fontana, thank you for being what you are. Thank you for understanding yourself. Williams Bay, please, please figure it out. Million dollar bike paths are fine, but are they? Invest in your lakefront. Invest in your downtown. Offer incentives to develop and redevelop your commercial buildings and residential properties that line your main streets. It’s so great that you’ve spent untold millions on your school buildings. Terrific. Now focus on the reason your tax base is so high and your expenses are so low: the lakefront and your general business district. And lastly, to the City of Lake Geneva. Stop it. Be a high end resort town. Every time a new proposal for some new nonsense comes your way just ask yourself: Does anyone like the Dells?

South Shore Bar Fish Fry Review
David Curry

South Shore Bar Fish Fry Review

I was born in Elkhorn. Raised in Williams Bay. Then I lived in Linn Township, Geneva Township, Delavan Township, Fontana, and now Walworth Township. I am the embodiment of local. The word was made for me. If I’m not a local here, no one is a local anywhere. I was in France last week, being a non-local. If not for my strapping American frame and my obvious American nature, I might, after some lengthy period of time, be considered, at least by some, as a local.  This business of localness typically requires significant effort and significant time.  Last Friday night I walked in to the South Shore Bar and Grill on Delavan’s southern shore, feeling very much not like a local.

I’ve been to this bar before, or I should say, at least once before. I went with a friend for pizza on a night when our wives weren’t looking. On that night, I generally enjoyed the pizza, which is tavern style. But on this night, I was there for the fish fry, and the parking lot sign proclaimed that I was indeed at the right place. I should say that I didn’t intend to visit the South Shore Bar that night. I first went to the Rushing Waters Trout House restaurant in Delavan. The restaurant there is very large, and when we walked in we were delighted to see open tables and no one waiting. The hostess told us there would be a 20-30 minute wait. But there were open tables, I replied, incredulous in my tone. She said there weren’t enough servers. And so we left. This is embarrassing for the Trout House, and if I were in any position of authority there I’d quickly right my ship before all of this excess water sinks it.

The South Shore Bar and Grill is a bar. There’s a large bar in the main room, with a small dining room off to the West side. When we arrived the parking lot was full and so was the restaurant. We were told the wait would be maybe 10 minutes, so we stood by the door, sticking out like very sore thumbs. Eyes glanced our direction. At least one man at the bar whispered something to another man at the bar. It might have been about my powder blue shorts, but I couldn’t be certain. A man on the other side of the bar drank from a tall can of Busch Light. His wife nursed a cocktail.  Everyone knew each other, no one knew us. If it weren’t for the Wisconsin law, I’m guessing 40% of the bar would have been pulling on a heater.

A polite but somewhat harried hostess led us to our booth. The booth cushion on the one side was torn open in many spots, so I opted for the other side. But the other side had very little breathing room, and the table was affixed to the wall, a condition I only realized after pushing and tugging at it for a while. I switched with my son and sat on the torn side. I reviewed my fishy options.

All you can eat fried cod, $11.50. Baked cod dinner, $11.50. Pan Fried Walleye, $15.95. Fried Walleye, $15.95. Fried Perch Dinner, $15.95. These are fine options. Impressive really, for a small bar on the way to no-where, just around the corner from Nothing. The menu reflected a general understanding of the Wisconsin Fish Fry. All items were served with a  side of potato and access to the small salad bar that resided in between the bar and the dining room. I asked the waitress what she recommended. The fried walleye was a bit bland for her taste. She loved the perch. I opted for the fried cod, with a piece of baked cod for good measure.

The salad bar was modest. A few bowls of mayonnaise based salad of some variety, along with some lettuce, chopped onion and tomato, and shredded cheese. I could have used a few more accoutrements, but seeing as how I was at a bar for fish fry, I didn’t mind. If you wanted a salad bar, you should have gone to a salad restaurant. This was a fried food restaurant with a side of pizza, and I was content to nibble a bit of salad and wait for my fish. After a week  of French food,  my stomach was hankering for some classic Wisconsin fish fry.

And the South Shore Bar didn’t disappoint. The fried cod came out, two pieces with my initial order, and it was delightful. The batter was well seasoned, and the fish was moist, sweet, and salty. I really loved it. The baked was a bit dry, but it was served with a small plastic tub of drawn butter, and that made everything better. There was a single slice of rye bread on my plate, which was awful as expected but it was buttered so how terrible could it really be? Give me liberty or give me death, but if you’re going to give me rye bread you should at least butter it for me.

The two potato pancakes were nicely fried to a golden brown, and while they were a touch dry, they met the expectation of an average pancake.  I quickly ate all of my food and asked for a few more pieces of fried cod, not because I was hungry but because I refuse to walk away from an all-you-can-eat dinner offering without ordering seconds. The cod was again delightful, even if my second piece was thicker and ended up being slightly undercooked.  My wife said the tartar sauce was okay, and I found the applesauce to be delicious. It was served ice cold, and had immense flavor. It was, perhaps, my favorite applesauce to date.

I enjoyed my dinner at the South Shore Bar and Grill.  The waitress was sweet and attentive, the food above average for this tour. The fried cod was a real treat, as the seasoned batter elevated otherwise bland cod to a higher level. I’d add the South Shore Bar to your Fish Fry rotation, especially if your preferred joint is slammed this summer.  I left feeling satisfied in my dinner, and had it not been for those powder blue shorts and my wife’s white jeans, we might have fit right in.

 

South Shore Bar and Grill 7/10

W6763 South Shore Drive, Delavan, WI

$11.50 All You Can Eat Fried Cod

 

Geneva National Vs. The World
David Curry

Geneva National Vs. The World

If you think the vacation home market at the lake is active, you should check out the market for sub-$350k single family and condominium residences that lack lake access. That market is absolutely on fire. A recent search I performed showed 23 single family homes in Williams Bay priced between $310k and $400k. Of those 23, 15 were pending sale. That’s a hot market. Similarly so, the vacation home segment under $400k is also active, and that activity isn’t only involving properties with lake access. There’s an entire subset of vacation homes here, those condominiums that lack dedicated water access but still, often, appeal to a vacation home buyer.

Condominiums, wherever they are found, lend themselves to vacation home ownership for pure ease of ownership, and as a result, the off-water, non-access condominium market in Walworth County is a common target for vacation home seekers who find themselves with a fixed budget. Many of these buyers find their way to Abbey Springs, where they receive lake access, or to other condominiums like Willabay Shores in Williams Bay or the Abbey Villas in Fontana. It’s obvious, too, that these buyers end up in Geneva National. But increasingly I’m finding it annoying that Geneva National is overlooked by so many in this sub-$300k price range.

As I don’t often work this market, you’ll know my annoyance is genuine, as I’m not stumbling into this condition simply because it doesn’t serve my purpose. Geneva National might offer solid value and a rare setting, but as budget minded buyers know, it also offers a hefty monthly association fee. Often lakefront condominiums on Geneva will have elevated fees, but that’s an understood situation given the piers and pools and increased amenities. Geneva National has high fees, and while it offers justifiable amenities, many buyers will look directly past GN based solely on those monthlies. I think this is a mistake.

Let’s consider a random Geneva National condominium and contrast it to competing inventory in the broad market. For our purpose today, we’re going to look at a Highlands unit listed around $220k. This unit is a three bedroom, three bath, with a two car attached garage, three levels of finished space and a walkout lower level. The unit is a bit dated at this point, but who isn’t? The tax bill is around $3500 with monthly association fees of $590. That fee covers exterior maintenance, pools, tennis court, gated security, private roads, etc and etc. It’s a nice condo for the money.

If we’re a buyer of a three bedroom condominium in the Lake Geneva area, another reasonable option would be a unit listed for sale on the East end of the City of Lake Geneva listed at $290k. This is a four bedroom unit with slightly more square footage, but a two car garage and a one less full bath. To be certain, this is also a nice unit, and any buyer on a budget would likely find living here to be pleasant. The condo fees are $235, the taxes $4200.  The fee covers exterior maintenance. And exterior maintenance. There’s nothing else for it to cover.

The sort of buyer that might be drawn to the city condo would likely find the low monthly fees to be an important data point. Those fees might be the same reason they avoided Geneva National. But let’s really consider those fees. The GN fees allow use of a resort community with pools, tennis, walking trails, gated security, and more. The fees at the other development cover simple exterior maintenance. There’s no resort there. No other value added amenities. Just a condo that lists access to the highway as an amenity. These may seem like similar units, but they are not, as a matter of fact, even remotely the same.

But that’s just the lifestyle difference, and that’s where Geneva National shines, so let’s go back and look at those monthly fees. To own in Geneva National, versus our fill-in-competition, it’ll cost an extra $4260 per year. Ouch, that’s rough. That’s why people avoid GN. But let’s dig a bit more. The taxes at GN are $700 cheaper, owing that to a Town of Geneva tax scale, rather than the City of Lake Geneva. Now our annual premium is down to $3560. The fee in Geneva National covers water and sewer charges, which the other condo adds in separately (according to the MLS listing). It’s fair to assume the annual water/sewer charge for moderate use would be around $800. Now our Geneva National premium is down to $2760.

Now that we’ve figured out the monthly fee difference, consider what that $2760 buys you. Tennis, pools, gated security. Is that worth $230 a month? I think it is, but you might not be so easily convinced. What we’re forgetting here is that the Geneva National condo is a full $70k less in initial purchase price. If we’re financing our transaction with a 20% down payment, that means the non-GN condo cost us $14k more up front, and adds $335 to our monthly liability. If we’re paying cash for the purchase, assuming a similar discount to ask for each unit, we’re forking over an additional $70k for the amenity-void unit.  That’ll cover the next 25 years of Geneva National premium.

The exercise today is simple. Let’s stop ruling out condominiums based solely on monthly fees. Let’s consider the real numbers behind that initial number, and let’s buy something that matches our lifestyle and our budget, not just our budget.

Photo Courtesy either Ideal Impressions or Matt Mason Photography. I’m really not sure… 
Along The Way
David Curry

Along The Way

I love my kids. I really do. Of the few things in this life of which I’m certain, that condition is firmly assured. But I can’t stand driving anywhere with them. Short trips, long trips, it’s all the same, and it’s all awful. Social Media, this week and the last, has been full of road tripping families, heading to some awful place in Northern Florida, the kids crammed into the backseat with pillows and blankets and iPads and earbuds. The images are supposed to evoke feelings of good old fashioned family fun, but to me, they are the stuff of nightmares. Loving my kids is one thing, loving spending time in cars with them is an entirely other thing.

During the summers of my youth, in between bouts of rag tag, lawn mowing and, well, rag tag and lawn mowing, my family would take to the interstates and spend two weeks in another place. We did this for many reasons, but mostly so my dad could rent out his house to raise money to help pay his property taxes.  We packed our station wagon, whichever one it was at the time, hitched up the trailered Boston Whaler, and proceeded to pack the Whaler full of everything we thought we might need for two weeks in the north woods of Minnesota. The preparation for the trip was remarkably stressful, and to this day, I cannot pack for a trip anywhere without falling into my father’s pattern of yelling and stressing over every detail of the chaos.

Most years, we’d cram into the back of that station wagon, first a blue one and then a red one, three brothers in the back, parents in the front, and we’d drive through the night without much excitement. The drive was long, perhaps eight hours worth, and exceedingly boring. There were no iPads to distract. No iPhones to amuse. Just the road and the night and three sweaty boys, packed like sardines in a can lined with red upholstery.

One year, a wheel bearing gave out in Minneapolis sometime around midnight. I don’t remember the details of that night, but it was similar to when Clark fell asleep and took that exit to the wrong part of Saint Louis.  In spite of the hiccup, we arrived the next morning in those northwoods, the washboard rumble of the camp driveway serving as our only notice.  Once we arrived, we’d spend our time swimming and following girls and attending more church services in two weeks than most fit into a year.  After two weeks we’d pack up and drive through the summer night. We’d be home by morning, because there were lawns to mow.

The summer trips we took were never about the journey. They were only about the destination. We didn’t stop to see the World’s Largest Ball Of Twine. We didn’t stop to take pictures at overpasses. We just drove because we knew the destination was worth the effort.  The journey, well that was just the price we had to pay.

There’s a new Pure Michigan commercial disrupting my television commercials of late, and it’s a commercial that praises the journey.  Along the way, Tim Allen insists, is where we have the most fun.  Along the way, he says, is the place we’ve been longing for. I’ve always been trained to endure the journey to embrace the destination. Suffer through the trip, because it’ll be worthwhile when you get to where you’re going. This is why I fly Frontier to Denver.  Tim Allen says otherwise. He’s told us that the journey is where it’s at. But, like always, he’s wrong. This is what people say when the destination isn’t very good. This is what people say when the journey is long and the travelers are weary.  Drive to Michigan if you must, just remember the commercial asks you to enjoy the trip because the destination isn’t all that great.

Image by Matt Mason Photography
Lake Geneva Yacht Club Fish Fry Review
David Curry

Lake Geneva Yacht Club Fish Fry Review

Sometimes, dive bars aren’t where it’s at. They’re fun, the irony of it all, of the dated this and the out of style that.  But once in a while you just want to be surrounded by nice things. This is why we have nice lake houses. Old cottages are cute and fun, but luxury isn’t so bad either. Last Friday night I abandoned the dive bar scene and embraced the fanciful surroundings of the lake set. The Lake Geneva Yacht Club serves a Fish Fry, which means it must be judged.

Friday night wasn’t a great night. It was a bit windy and a bit cloudy, excepting a bright burst of sun that pushed through the low clouds right around sunset. The dying light made one last gasp and filled the lakefront bar just as we pulled up a chair. Our benevolent hosts had arrived before my wife and I, and as we chatted in that beautiful bar that lakefront light slowly faded beyond the western shore.

This is a restaurant at a yacht club (with a venerable history), so the E-Scow hanging from the ceiling and the trophies filling the glass cases shouldn’t come as any surprise. The surroundings here are vibrant and clean, beautiful, really, as they should be given the building is only a few years old. A large fireplace anchors the Eastern wall of that large, lakeside dining room.  The glow flickered throughout the room, with the overhead chandeliers warmed to low.  Excepting Pier 290, this is the nicest scene of any fish fry you’ll find in the Lake Geneva area.  But this is also a private club, so you’ll need to consider membership to enjoy this place. Or just be like me, and tag along with friends.

After some time lingering near the bar, where I nursed my Sprite, we sat at a table for four in the middle of that lovely dining room.  The crowd was well dressed, happy, with most sporting birth years that fell closer to those of my parents than my own. The waiter was quickly table side, and with a slightly uneasy cadence described our dining options. The Fish Fry was two piece cod, served broiled or fried, served with potato pancakes, applesauce, tartar sauce, hushpuppies, and coleslaw.  That sounds good, I’ll take it.

The Crab Cake appetizer looked worthwhile, so we took a stab. It was a singular cake ($14), nicely crisped but tender as a crab cake should be. It was served with a smear of something or other and a small assembly of finely diced vegetables, bacon, and some corn. It was a delicious appetizer, though I would have liked to have some larger chunks of crab in the cake.  In the distance, the old men in blazers discussed the wind and knots and cleats and sails.

The fish arrived within a reasonable amount of time, served on a white platter with quality, smaller dishes holding in the tartar sauce and other accompaniments. I liked this, as the plague of plastic takeout containers had been kept out of this fine establishment. The fish filets were not large, but they were large enough, and shaped like a proper rectangle, not a silly square. A lemon wedge sat atop my broiled piece. The potato pancakes were moderately sized, and after a disappointing run where my cakes were served in the singular, I had a nice pair of pancakes to consider.

My first bite was of the fried cod.  The batter was super crunchy, thin, not tough, the cod white and tender like the cod in my dreams. It was perfect. Well salted, slightly sweet, and perhaps the best fried cod I’ve had so far, only rivaled by the Lookout Bar at Lake Lawn Lodge. The broiled piece was slightly undercooked, which is preferable to slightly overcooked.  The hushpuppies (2) were sweet and creamy, the best hushpuppies I’ve had to date. If dusted with powdered sugar and served after dinner on a small white plate, I would have appreciated them even as a dessert.

The potato pancakes were well salted, with a bit of extra flavor that I couldn’t quite identify. They were thin, but properly cooked, nicely crisped, and delightful. Were they the best pancake I’ve had? No, but they were close.  The applesauce was too smooth for my liking, but it was cold and flavorful. The tartar sauce, according to my dinner mates, was lighter than typical, nuanced with flavor, and generally accepted as being delicious.

This was a beautiful dinner. The food was wonderful. The scene divine. The hushed murmurs of sailing strategy only slightly distracting to my fishy focus.  Given that this is a private club, it only stands to reason that it would be better than your average fish fry, but this dinner was exceptional. The next day, I inquired of the membership manager as to what a social membership would cost me. This is a fish fry I might not be able to live without.

 

Lake Geneva Yacht Club 9/10

1250 South Lakeshore Drive, Fontana, WI 

Members Only

$17 Single Serve Fried or Broiled Cod

Hillcroft Lake Geneva Sale
David Curry

Hillcroft Lake Geneva Sale

It’s fun to see the media make a fuss about a sale on Geneva Lake.   First up, please know that the media itself doesn’t pay such close attention to these lakefront sales. Once a sale is completed, the brokerage involved has a representative reach out to numerous media outlets to generate some buzz. This happens at large firms that need to hang on to their market share.  This is why, on the fresh heels of the Hillcroft sale, you’ve read so much about it and from so many different sources. Local news sources fawn all over Lake Geneva, largely because our market is so much different than that of the rest of this great state.  Lots of places in Wisconsin have large homes. Lots of places have high valuations. But at Lake Geneva, we not only have high valuations we also have high prints. You can own your expensive home anywhere in Wisconsin and that’ll be nice for you. The difference at Lake Geneva is that we can actually sell that house when you’re done with it.  It’s good to be king.

In spite of the media attention and the well known nature of this story, there is still work to be done. There is analysis that must be considered. The Hillcroft property was immensely large for this lake. 415′ of rare, mostly level frontage, situated on a small point. The frontage was spectacular. The location on the lake, just West of downtown and off of Snake Road, pretty much ideal. The overall property is 20 acres. That’s an obscene amount of property on this lake. Don’t forget, for the purposes of our local definition, 200′ of frontage and 3 acres constitutes a reasonable estate.  Hillcroft is off the charts in terms of land mass, and it should be applauded for simply being.  Consider the 2017 average for price per square foot of overall lakefront land mass was $58.09. Applied to Hillcroft, that would place the valuation over $50,000,000. (Compression doesn’t allow for this, of course).

There has been much fawning over the home itself. Over the size of it, the bedrooms, the baths. The dining room and library.  I always loved this home from the lakeside. The way the structure follows the curve of the lakefront is rather divine. But as an agent who showed this home when it was available I can say this: The house, while beautiful on the exterior, was average.   The layout compromised, the finishes mostly dated. Any praise this property receives should be dedicated to the property, to the old Wrigley buildings that still exist, and to the history of it all.

The average price per front foot of lakefront settled at $27,193 for 2017. Typically, larger properties are unable to achieve that average, as compression once again rears its ugly, insistent head. But in the case of the Hillcroft property, the price held up. At 415 feet of frontage, the average would have yielded a print at $11,285,095, which is nearly identical to the actual print of $11,250,000. That’s a surprise of sorts, given the structure was so meh, but when you factor in that overall value of land mass, the lakefront average makes perfect sense.

Is this the highest priced sale in Lake Geneva history? Yes.   Was the sale a surprise? Not at all. It makes perfect sense, and the only issue in our marketplace now is that we won’t likely have another Hillcroft to sell for a while. But that brings us to an important concept regarding this lakefront market. Is Hillcroft a rare property? Obviously. Will it remain as the top dollar sale for a long time? Not likely. Consider the previous high sale was the property that I represented at W4449 North Lakeshore in Linn. I closed that property for $9,950,000 in late 2016. Hillcroft surpassed that sale by only 13%.  The North Lakeshore sale was of a gorgeous house on reasonably nice dirt. The Hillcroft sale was of legacy dirt with a reasonably blah house. What the market has yet to see is the ultra rare combination of a gorgeous, newer house built on top of rare, meaningful dirt. Yes, 200′ lots with beautiful homes on them exist, and they exist plenty. Yes, those prices could easily be in the $7-10MM range. But those prices won’t dethrone Hillcroft. What will dethrone Hillcroft, and likely soon, will be the combination of that perfect house on that perfect dirt.

Don’t blink, it’s coming.

(I wasn’t the listing or sale agent for Hillcroft, which is a terrible and embarrassing shame. If you’re a buyer or seller of such a property, you should be working with me. This sort of top sale without my involvement can never, ever happen again).

Popeye’s Fish Fry Review
David Curry

Popeye’s Fish Fry Review

I called ahead. It was 5:50 pm and I figured I’d arrive at Popeye’s with my party of six sometime just after 6.  I learned many weeks ago not to take  off-season dinner seating for granted, so I called Popeye’s and a woman answered. I asked if I needed a reservation for dinner.  She said, “honey, we seat 600.”  But then she proceeded to tell me that a reservation wouldn’t be a terrible idea and she took my name. I asked if they had fish fry, a question asked with an answer already known. Honey, we have the best fish fry in Southeastern Wisconsin. 

It’s difficult to be a big restaurant in the biggest location in the biggest resort town in the Midwest. While I imagine it’s nice to have seating for 600, and that premium location will never go out of style, if you would have asked Andre, he’d agree. It’s not easy being a giant. When I suggested Popeye’s for fish fry my friend immediately replied,  “Is the food good or is it just a cheesy tourist trap?” 

The parking meters are no longer free. We learned this after parking and noticing the meter maid waltzing along the lakeside street, after 6 pm.  I insisted to the meter maid that assuredly parking had to be free after 6 pm, at least in March, right? 7 pm, the maid replied. I fed my credit card into the machine and felt certain that had it been 7 pm his answer would have been 8 pm.  Slightly irritated by the gall of the Lake Geneva Parking Policies, we entered Popeyes and were led to our seats in the elevated dining room to the East of the entry and bar.  In the event that you didn’t know, Popeye’s Lake Geneva is not affiliated with the fast food restaurant that shares their name.

Our water glasses were quickly filled and my typical question about the fish fry posed. $14.99, all you can eat fried or broiled cod, with a choice of potato pancake or fries, hush puppies and a few of the usual sides. The waitress moved quickly through the dining room, quickly to our table, quickly from our table. Quickly. The evening rush was on and this large restaurant was filling up nicely. We ordered the fish and a half rack of ribs as a pregame to our fishy meal.

The ribs arrived quickly, and were fine. Nothing special. It’s a shame really, since there’s a charcoal spit roasting chickens outside at nearly all times. I’d make a custom basket for the ribs and twirl those over the charcoal along with the chicken.  But that’s just me, and I like tasty food. The menu says the ribs are smoked, which they may very well be, but I couldn’t detect a whiff of smoke in these ribs.  Within 10 minutes our dinner was served.

A huge tray of food was placed on an elevated platform in the middle of our table. It was like a pizza platform, but filled with fried and broiled fish, potato pancakes, and hushpuppies.  A few lemon wedges dressed up the edges. The french fries came in their own basket. It was a feast. I must say that I don’t like family style servings. It cheapens the food.  That’s the reason shrimp cocktail is usually served with five or six or eight shrimp tails. Throw 100 shrimp tails on a platter and smear some cocktail sauce in the middle and the special treat has turned into a free for all.

I grabbed a few pieces of fried cod, one piece of broiled cod, a potato pancake and a hushpuppy. The hushpuppy was nicely crisped, tender in the middle. It tasted of crab. It may have had some crab in it, but I didn’t check the menu to see if it really did. The pancake was quite good. My grandmother was a terrible cook, but she did whip up a fine dish of Tetrazzini with bits of pimento peppers. These pancakes had pimento peppers, and I enjoyed the nostalgic flavor quite a bit. The potato was shredded, as it should be, the exterior crisped but not greasy. These were delicious potato pancakes, and for the first time this tour, I was offered a dollop of sour cream for my pancakes. I liked the effort.

The fried cod was shaped more like an extravagant fish stick.  The pieces were slender and narrow, like fingers. But there was some variation in the sizing, and I like variation in my fish filets. The batter was light and airy, the first of its kind on this winter tour. The fish was tender, well seasoned, and quite delicious. I was impressed. The broiled cod was your basic square of cod, needing salt and lacking any particular dimension.  The french fries were delicious, slightly spicy, and memorable. I place them in a tie with Gordy’s for finest traditional french fry in the area.

The sides were a disappointment. I have long adored the dinner rolls at Popeyes, and used to eat one with a bowl of clam chowder long ago when I ate semi-frequent lunches there. This fish feast, not that it needed it, didn’t include any bread. No dinner roll. No loaf of bread. No slice of intolerable Rye. I suppose I’d rather have no bread than be blindsided by Rye, but still. With no bread there was no butter, no judging. The applesauce was bland and smooth, and sadly served in a small plastic take out container.

The tartar sauce was apparently rather sweet, but not terrible, also served in a take out container. There was no coleslaw. Had there been coleslaw, it would have been served in one of those take out containers, the sort you’d pump ketchup into at a Culver’s. We finished most of the mountain of food and the waitress quickly cleared our table. There was some leftover fish and at least one potato pancake, but the food was unceremoniously taken from the table.  The menu warns that leftovers will not be taken home.

Popeyes very well might be a cheesy tourist restaurant.  There is so much flair here, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for Chotchkie’s.  It’s an undeniably large, loud space. The prime seats are the two tops nearest the window, even on a dark March night.  While this Lake Geneva institution won’t win any awards for excellence in design, Popeyes manages to be both cheesy tourist trap and purveyor of above average fare.   On this Friday night, I left impressed by the fish fry. Sure, I bemoaned the lack of bread, coleslaw (the menu says it’s included), and softened butter. And I felt ill over the plastic  cup my flavorless, smooth applesauce was served in. But the lightly fried cod was delicate and well seasoned, the potato pancake with pimento rather divine, and that’s all it takes to win my affection.

 

Popeye’s Fish Fry 8/10

Cod, All You Can Eat, $14.99

811 Wrigley Drive, Lake Geneva

Above, Popeye’s image courtesy Visit Lake Geneva.
Lake Geneva Market Update
David Curry

Lake Geneva Market Update

It feels like it wasn’t so long ago that I wished for more snow. For more cold. For more winter. Shortly after wishing, all of that came true. Briefly. Since then the weather has been a mix of spring and sort of winter, the dreaded in between that will come to define the next six weeks of our existence. But fret not, for February is nearly over. With it we leave behind the Olympics, and with that, we leave behind the nightly disappointment of a country with so many participants, but so few medals.  It’ll be March soon, and then we can lament the weather in March and wish for it to be April. Once April starts, we have just one more month of wishing for May. Soon, it’ll be nice out.

Even though the weather is haphazard, the real estate market doesn’t really care.  New inventory has been introduced to market, much of it by yours truly.  Pending sales have printed, and new contracts have been written. Some have been accepted. My lakefront in Loramoor closed late last month for $4,950,000, placing that property in what will be a short-lived position of first. Like when a US skater is in the gold medal position before anyone else has laced up their skates. Another lakefront in the city of Lake Geneva closed recently, that of a small hillside home listed and closed at $1.799MM.  I’ll be expecting to see that home torn down or significantly remodeled. A home in the Birches on 105′ of elevated frontage closed for $3MM.

A new lakefront came to market with 150′ of frontage and a $3.975MM asking price. I sent it around but didn’t think too much of it, and then it sold. The market doesn’t always care what I think, which is probably good, since I tend to be conservative in my valuations. A small lakefront in Williams Bay listed just over a buck is pending sale, but there’s nothing more I feel like adding to that one. A level lakefront in the Narrows is under contract recently, listed in the $2.3s.  Rounding out the lakefront activity, there are three remaining 2017 contracts left out there waiting to close, those of lakefronts listed at $3.85MM, $6.5MM, and $12.5MM. It’s going to be a terrific 2018, and we’ve only just begun.  For a full list of available lake access and lakefront homes, CLICK HERE. Feel free to share this post with anyone you know who also might appreciate an accurate list of inventory.

I’ve added some new lake access inventory this month, including a large home in Indian Hills.  Listed at $675k, it will give the new owner an opportunity to engage in the Fontana scene, with very little effort. The home is spacious, with two story foyer, main floor master bedroom, and five total bedrooms. There’s also a two car garage, along with those private Indian Hills lake rights.  I added another home in the lower price ranges this month as well, that of an off-water home in Geneva West. This is about a mile north of the lake in Williams Bay. That home, pictured above, offers a charming spread for a buyer looking for a primary residence in the Williams Bay School District, or perhaps a vacation home owner looking to find privacy at an affordable price.

A particular sale of note involves a large condo in Fontana at the Fontana Club.  I sold this unit to the original owner, when I represented the developer back in 2001. The first sale was of a single unit, then the buyer bought an adjacent unit and remodeled the space into one large residence. I sold that combined unit for him in 2006 for $1.125MM, at the time that would represent the obvious peak in the lakefront condo market. That new owner  has offered the unit for sale off and on over recent years, while the price steadily eroded. That double unit closed this month for $685k. That’s a terrible thing.  The good news for the Fontana Club is that with this sale, and that of my single unit that closed last fall for $390k, the aged inventory has finally and mercifully been cleared from the market. The best situation for the Fontana Club would now be to withhold any inventory from the market so that demand can slowly build.

Overall, I like the way the market is behaving so far this year, but I’m increasingly wary of over confident sellers. I’ve often told you how I personally behave when I’m a seller of my own home. I recognize the fact that I need that buyer more than that buyer needs me. My particular home is the only home I need to sell, whereas that buyer has several different homes he can choose. Sellers so far in 2018 are negotiating from a position of strength, which they have understandably earned.  There are some buyers, as evidenced in the market today, that will pay a seller’s price, no matter if it’s 15% too high or not. But most of the buyers are still smart, even if they choose to work with an agent they found on Zillow, because Premier Agent’s must be amazing! (or willing to pay huge sums of money to buy leads) But these buyers are still reasonably concerned about their investment, and they’re not pushing prices quite as high as sellers would like. I’ve heard of and been part of several negotiations over the last six months that featured buyers and sellers in odd standoffs over insignificant amounts of money.  Should buyers come up? Maybe. Should sellers come down? Maybe. Should you stop working with any agent who isn’t David Curry? Duh.

Above, my listing in Geneva West. $499k.
New Geneva Lakefront Listing
David Curry

New Geneva Lakefront Listing

It is no secret that the South Shore Club is an exclusive development. Anything numbering just 40 in total would be viewed as exclusive. While this is known, what isn’t so well known is that exclusivity does exist here on a higher level. The homes are each unique,  each impressive. The slate, the stone, the imported this and hand hammered that, it’s all very intoxicating. There’s plenty of reason why the South Shore Club is entirely sold out, with no available inventory as of this writing. Whether the home is on Forest Hill near the tennis court, or right on the semi-circle that rings the lake like a modern day Congress Club, the structure is divine and the home a veritable castle for its fortunate owner. But this is the obvious.  This is what everyone, no, anyone, can see with their own two open eyes if they so much as drive past, or perhaps through, the South Shore Club.

But what is a higher prize are the select homes that line not just the circle of lush grass where a swimming pool and clubhouse reside, but those homes that rest immediately adjacent to the lake itself. These are the few lakefront homes of the South Shore Club, and these are the homes that compete with private frontage in such a way that they are not just a different option for those seeking private frontage, they can indeed become the better option. In this hunt for the exclusive within the exclusive, we find ourselves at the door of 1621 East Lakeside Lane.

We’ve already established that each home in the SSC is a shining jewel in its own right, but what we miss when we paint with this wide brush is that individual homes do stand out among this spiffy crowd. Some homes are larger, as is this one. At just over 10,000 square feet, this home is large enough to meet any square footage desire, and yet boasts a design that is approachable with rooms that feel airy but not so large that they become unnecessary or somehow irrelevant. This home has more privacy, more outdoor space, more this and more that.  The floor plan here is delightful, with everything a discerning buyer might require for a true lakefront home. There are finishes that exceed the highest of expectations. The Ralph Lauren interior design works perfectly at the lake.

In spite of all this perfection, the location of this home might be its most important attribute. Nestled on the extreme eastern edge of the club, there is more space between this home and its lakefront neighbor to the East. This spacious side yard is a result of superior site planning, and it’s this side yard that makes this home feel less like just another home in the South Shore Club and more like one of the finest lakefront homes you’ll ever lay eyes on. The views from the home rival or exceed that of any lakefront home on Geneva, with unavoidable lake views present in many of the rooms, and most pronounced from the epic lakeside stone patio.

This is the appeal of this exquisite home. It is part of the South Shore Club, and along with that membership it enjoys the unrivaled trappings of such luxury- the free and varied boats, the tennis court, the pool and hot tub, the clubhouse.  Think you need to buy a life vest for your daughter here? Think again, they’re included as it’s all part of the South Shore Club experience. These are the amenities, and when a home like this requires the use of those, they are available at any moment. But what is different here is the ability to detach from the South Shore Club and live as a true lakefront home. If the activities are needed, they are there. But if they are not needed, and the new owner requires little more than a comfortable lounge chair to rest on and the sound of lapping waves as their soundtrack, this is also available. It’s in the ability to live as a true lakefront home with the wide array of South Shore Club activities available when they are wanted and out of sight, and perhaps mind, when they are not.

 

This is the only available home in the South Shore Club, and it just so happens to be one of the most special. If you’re looking for lakefront and want to purchase something that’s both beautiful and easy to own, this is your chance. I sold the house next door in less than three weeks last summer. Available for private tour with notice.  $4,850,000

2018 State Of The Market
David Curry

2018 State Of The Market

(Lake Geneva lovers to the left of the podium, smiling and clapping, standing. Michigan lovers to the right of my podium, scowling, sitting, glaring. Me, walking, shaking, waving. My hair tall, my grip firm, my smile electric. Scene.)

 

My fellow Americans, those prized long tenured lake lovers, those recent converts to our religion of lake living, and those new buyers who hail from Winnetka and beyond, today in Lake Geneva some snow sculptors put on one extra layer of long underwear before heading out of their hotel room door. Today it is a good day to be us. Today, we are the American dream.

An architect put his pencil to paper, intent on designing another great vacation home for another discerning buyer, and we shall count this work as a job saved by the bustling Lake Geneva economy. A city worker plowed and pushed so much snow, up over the median and onto the lawn, so that it might be trampled on and later today carved into a swan, or Shrek, or a dragon, and he did this without complaining. Later today, a mother from Buffalo Grove will log on to her computer, and she’ll stumble upon this website and her eyes will be opened to the possibility of a Lake Geneva vacation home. This is the promise of America, yes, but it’s the further promise of Lake Geneva. And when this mother searches and strives and brings her family to the lake this summer, and oh so many summers after, this is when the dream of my father, and of her father will have been realized. Of course, that assumes her father dreamt of this in the way that my father did, but still. It’s in these people, the city worker and the snow sculptor and the mother from Buffalo Grove and my father and her father that combine to make the state of the Lake Geneva market strong.

The results of this work, of the street plower dutifully fulfilling his pledge, and of the mother looking and then buying the most perfect lake house, is that our market has never been stronger. We have never been stronger.  We own the Midwest vacation home market, and it is all but assured that the coming year will be as bright as the years that preceded it. No, brighter.  We do not shut off our lights, or turn away any weary travelers just because we are content in our own strength. Instead we offer benevolence to the lake weary, to those who toil and labor in cities and in suburbs, and we offer them shelter because that is what we do and this is who we are.  How can we call ourselves Americans if we do not encourage those with the means to lay down roots near our shores?

The question for us today is actually only for you. It is not for you if you’re content with your vacation home ownership here. If you splash your way through every summer, this is not a charge that you need to consider because you have already passed this greatest test. The question today is for those who sit at their computers, who sit on their couches, who spend Saturday wondering what Sunday will bring even though you know it just brings a long line and then brunch.  Maybe a stroller ride through an insufferable park.  The question is what, exactly, are you doing? Why are you allowing a most un-American complacency to drag down your weekends, when you know that we’re here- the city worker, polishing the streets that we’d like you to drive over, and the mother, picking up corn at the farmer’s market in the morning to cook it lakeside in the evening. We are here, working and playing and living in a most amazing fashion, even while you sit there in that same new chair, obstructing your own path in life simply because you’re scared to venture into the unknown.  Do you not dream our same watery dreams?

But this isn’t the unknown, my friends, this is America, yes, the most pure version of it. This is America, if the entirety of it would be washed in clean water, surrounded by a lush green shore, where every family gets not just an organic chicken from Yuppie Hill Poultry, but also a boat in every slip and some gas in that boat and a few hours of leisure. This is what we offer, and in the coming months you must make a decision to join us or forever get out of our way. In God We Trust, yes but do we not also trust in blue water and soft summer skies?  We can make progress this year, together, but we cannot do this without your cooperation. We can lead you to the water but we cannot make you swim. We cannot simply urge you to join us if you will not make even a modest effort. This isn’t what it is to be an American, to lie and lounge in city apartments and in suburban backyards, this isn’t the sense of adventure that our fore-bearers wished for us. Do you not aspire to join us in our greatness?

But today is for the laborer. The partner and the founder. The director and the vice president.  They rise and they work, and they rise and they work. They wake on Saturday and they pretend that this day is somehow different. They rise and think that a Lake Geneva vacation home isn’t for them, because it hasn’t ever been for them. That this dream is unattainable. They huddle in their darkest corners, holding tight to their money that they’ve worked so hard to earn, and they fear the things that might happen if they let some of it go. They live as though their pedigree is in question, as though they cannot consider Lake Geneva because of its long enduring reputation as a place for the societal elites. I assure you today, as I will assure you again tomorrow, that Lake Geneva is for everyone, for every make and model, for anyone who wakes on a Saturday and says, “I’m bored here, let’s go to the lake”.

And so I make this decree, by executive order I hereby demand every vacation home seeker of some means to at least consider a Lake Geneva vacation home.  Your complacency cannot thrive under this bright lakeside sun, and so this command today by me, your dictat- err- President, shall be followed otherwise the willing dissenters risk being labeled enemy combatants.  We may disagree on the course of value, or on the benefits of one shore over the other, or on which restaurant is worthy of our breakfasting intentions and which restaurants are not, but we can agree that Lake Geneva is the place to be. In fact, it always has been, and it always will be. If we can summon the courage to live in a way that finds our weekends at the lake, then we can overcome anything. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless Lake Geneva and no place else.

2017 Market Reviews
David Curry

2017 Market Reviews

One year ago, I wrote my year end market reviews and worried about 2017 inventory.  2016 had been a terrific year, but without inventory there was no way that 2017 could match that success.  For the year 2016, we sold 103 lakefront and lake access homes on and near Geneva Lake. That was a solid tally. With the inventory concerns heading into 2017, I was uncertain we could come anywhere near that figure, but here we are. 2017 wrapped with 119 such sales, beating the prior year even though the outlook, at least based on inventory, was bleak. So what happened? Was there some rush of new inventory? Was there some development that came online and offered up a large chunk of ready-made sales? Neither event happened. Instead, Geneva was Geneva. We sold new inventory relatively quickly, and the market turned to the aged inventory and decided maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Today there are just 35 lakefront and lake access homes available on and near Geneva Lake.  That number is a bit artificial as it doesn’t take into account properties that recently expired and have not yet been brought back to market, but the number is still startling.  Making matters worse, there are only 11 lakefront homes available for sale. That number is just awful, but I suppose that depends on your perspective. If you’re an agent, like, say, me, then this is simply horrendous. If you’re a buyer, you feel the same. But if you’re a seller, especially a seller of a property that has experienced a length time on market, then this news couldn’t be better.  Our market, like any market, lives and dies on inventory. Today, there isn’t any. It’s Ground Hog Day in January.

It’s safe to say that the Lake Geneva vacation home market has been on a solid bull-run since the end of 2013. The market recovered volume in 2011 and 2012, but prices didn’t stabilize and find some margin until that later date.  That means we’re entering year five of a rather remarkable run. The market has made price gains, eliminated aged inventory, cleansed a few weak owners from the scene, and generally, completely, forged ahead. The lake is abuzz with new construction, leaving a market that finds a $4MM price tag to be somewhat median.  The market is starved for inventory, each of decent land in the $2-3.5MM range, of entry level offerings sub $1.5MM, and of newer construction in the $4-10MM range. For the first time ever, I believe there’s a market for homes in the $10-15MM range, even though this market has never been properly tested.

While this run has featured buyers of every sort and wealth finding their way to the lakefront, it can most easily be recognized as being the run that delivered higher end buyers to these shores. $4MM is the new $3MM.  $7MM is the new $5MM. The stakes have been raised, and Geneva continues to be set apart not only by the quality of our water and the vibrancy of our scene, but by our ability to produce upper bracket liquidity. I’ve said it often, and it continues to be more true each time I do, but Geneva is alone at the top of the Midwest vacation home segment. There is no market that comes close. Michigan, for all its effort, cannot hold a candle to our inland lake. Door County’s real estate market should be renamed Bore County. The Northwoods? Is that even a market?  Geneva is the king, and with each passing year we become more worthy and the title becomes more and more permanent.

I’m looking forward to providing you with 2017 market reviews, and will do so on the typical breaks in our vacation home market. This year, each market has had plenty of success, leaving the recovery no longer spotty, no longer skewed in favor of one segment over another. As with last year, my primary concern for the new year has to do with inventory. If we feed the market, it will continue to grow.  In spite of tax changes that take away some advantages of second home ownership and limit SALT deductions, I do not believe these will significantly or adversely affect our market. Why?  Because there’s no other market like it, and there’s no better place to spend your weekends. Staying home on a Saturday just so you can have a few extra bucks in your robust bank account doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t see the new legislation hurting our market, even if it likely will keep a buyer or two on the sidelines. If late December/early January activity is a harbinger of things to come, 2018 looks like it will be our fifth straight solid year.

 

Above, sunset at 700 South Lakeshore Drive, sold by this guy for $5,900,000 in May of 2017.
Tax Time
David Curry

Tax Time

If you’re lucky enough to be a Lake Geneva vacation home owner, then you’re unlucky enough to be unwrapping Walworth County’s most untimely gift: Your property tax bill.  When I’m elected supreme ruler of Walworth County, I will change our fiscal year so that you receive your tax bill on July 6th.  While draped in young summer you’ll find the tax bill to be a worthy pittance. Something to be celebrated over brats and charcoal. Why yes, I will pay this ungodly sum of money today! That’s what you’ll say. And you’ll be happy, because you’ll look around and feel the scene and understand that it’s all worthwhile. In early Winter, summer is so very far away, and the tax bill now appears as one last and final insult to the heap that is our year end.

About those taxes. With legislation in Washington DC spiraling towards completion, there are potential changes afoot for the way we’re able to deduct our paid property taxes. It seems as though the bubble of DC has decided it’s in our best interests to pay tax on tax, and who are we, mere peasants, to complain (I’ve complained a lot, and you should, too). With possible changes coming, it might be best to pay those 2017 taxes while it’s still 2017, rather than in two parts during 2018 as the invoice allows. Of course I’m not an accountant, so you should consult with yours, but this year, perhaps more than any other, it’s important to be paying attention.

And along those lines of paying attention, every year owners of Lake Geneva vacation homes miss the deadline for paying their property taxes. This happens through many different circumstances, but typically it has to do with the tax bill being sent to an address other than that which the property owner had planned. Perhaps the bill is being sent to your attorney, to your lake house address, or to the house you used to live in before you moved. The County is very callous towards your reasons, so it’s best to look up your taxes every December and be certain you have the bill and plan to pay it on time (or this year, as I mentioned above). To look up your tax bill, go here. It might be painful, and for that, I’m sorry.

If you purchase a Lake Geneva property this year, there’s an outside chance that your tax bill will be mailed to the prior owner. This isn’t really anyones fault, but it is annoying.  Rather than count on the prior owner to look up your address and mail you that tax bill, it’s best that you use the search link above, or contact the municipality in which you own your home and ask them for the bill. Be proactive, be aware, and don’t count on anyone to help you in the process. If you have no time to deal with these things, tell your attorney or accountant to handle it for you. They’ll like that.

Other year end bits to be aware of. Disconnect your hoses from outside spigots. Don’t forget. Leave your heat on at 60 degrees or more. If you need to keep the heat at 50, I’d suggest that you’re just begging for a pipe to break. Don’t do this, it’s a terrible, awful idea. I believe it’s called being penny wise and pound foolish, but I’m not British. Leave your heat warm enough so that your pipes don’t break, but also so that your tile floors and shower surrounds don’t crack. Warmth is good, please embrace it. If you need help with this, install a Nest (or similar) camera in your house, and a Nest thermostat. You can watch your house and your heat on your app. I’m building a tiny cabin in the outskirts of Nowhere, Wisconsin, and I have done this. If I can, you can, too.

Make sure your irrigation system is winterized. Your pool and hot tub, too. Your pier might not be out by now, but this is the burden of the pier company, unless you’re my dad and you’re intent on saving $110.89 by removing the pier boards yourself. Turn an outside light or two on, not because we have crime like Harbor Country, but because it just looks better. You can spare the $.80 per month to leave a few exterior coach lights on. Your neighbors will appreciate your concern for the exterior mood lighting.

Can you see what I’ve done here? I’ve played right into your hands. I’ve given you a list of things to do under the supposition that you won’t be at your lake house this winter. And in that, I’ve caught you. Missing out on winter at the lake would be a most egregious sin, tantamount to willingly paying tax on tax, or leaving your heat on at 48 degrees. You should be here, no matter the month. Ski here. Rest here. Go to fish fry here. If you didn’t want to visit your vacation home in the winter you probably should have bought one in Michigan, or Door County.

 

South Shore Club Sells
David Curry

South Shore Club Sells

In the South Shore Club, there are 40 total lots. Most are built on, a few are not. At present, there is one new construction underway.  To date, there had been one sale, that of an aged inventory home near the back of the lakeside circle. While there are 40 total, there are only four built homes that play as true lakefront homes. Those are the front homes, the homes you walk into and see the water, unavoidably.  Those are the homes that function as their own market, and the home I sold this week is part of that elite group.

There is some confusion over the South Shore Club, and how to come to a valuation. Will the market pay lakefront prices for these lakefront homes? The answer is yes, and no. The yes part is obvious, because there’s a sales pattern now that didn’t exist prior to 2012. The no part is less obvious, and it might not be a negative in the way you’re suspecting.  The market won’t pay true lakefront prices for these homes because the prices paid for them represent a discount to what those homes would trade for if they were on their own private lakefront parcels. So the market respects the South Shore Club, but buyers still expect a slight reduction over private frontage valuations. This is all good news.

Consider one way to look at this closing at $4,175,000. The last front house sold in 2014 for $3,591,000.  For 2014, the average price paid per lakefront foot was $21,144.  2017 YTD through October 10th, 2017, the average price paid is $27,743. That represents a 31% increase in valuation. If we apply the same appreciation increase to the South Shore Club lakefront four, we’d see a valuation $4,704,210.  Is this the only way to compute value? Of course not. A lakefront in Fontana sold in the high fours this fall, and that home, with a very small lot, sold for $713 per square foot. The South Shore Club home was 8736 square feet, which comes to a $477 per square foot.

A sincere thank you to the buyer and seller who let me help with this transaction. It was not the easiest deal I’ve ever worked on, and that comment may win Understatement Of The Year. That’ll put a wrap on my 2017 sales production, unless someone needs to close on a new house by the end of the year. Put a big red bow on it, like a Lexus. The year ends for me with $44MM in sales, which makes me the #1 individual Walworth County agent for 2017, and in that top slot for the third year in the past four. Combined with the 2016 volume that’s $106MM in the past 24 months. And that isn’t so bad. The address being written wrong on the property below that just sold, now that’s bad.

Bluff Lane
David Curry

Bluff Lane

Buyers have a unique tendency to focus on one or two aspects of a purchase, and in doing so, convince themselves to proceed with the transaction. This is true of jeans. If you love the fit but hate the color, you might buy them anyway. If you hate the fit but love the price, you might buy them anyway. This is why we have closets with jeans that we don’t wear. Sometimes it’s because we started working out and have, as a curious result, gained weight. But usually it’s because whatever jean we bought wasn’t quite right, but we bought it anyway. Houses are like this, too.

On the lakefront, it’s often less about what a house has than what it doesn’t. It has a fantastic stove. Yes! Shiny! But it has one bedroom. It has a big level lawn, sweet! But the foundation is an assortment of neatly, dry-stacked bricks placed at random intervals. Every house has good, and every house has bad. There is no perfect house. Not here, at least. Every property has something wrong with it.  Buyers like to focus on garages. Lake houses and garages have a curious relationship.  On one hand, a lake house doesn’t need a garage. Not at all. On the other hand, at a certain price point, the lake house demands a garage. It needs one. What’s that price point? That’s for you to decide, but I think it’s somewhere just north of $2MM. If I’m a $1.6MM lakefront house buyer, I should understand that a garage is an extravagance that my budget might not afford. If I’m a $3MM lake house buyer, I likely find a garage to be a requirement of the purchase. This is the way the market tends to behave.

That brings us to my newest lakefront listing, N1939 Bluff Lane. Follow the road through the little stone entry, and you’ll end up on the dead end of Bluff Lane. A few lakefront houses, not much more. It’s quiet, down here on Bluff. If you think the name is cute but not meaningful, you’d be wrong. Bluff Lane is indeed a high lane, with elevated frontage. That frontage creates steps, yes. But that elevation creates a most unique perch through which to absorb the lake. It’s a tree house setting, which is unique on this lake but highly interesting.

The house has five bedrooms, four baths. A two car detached garage is a newer addition to the property, along with a full lower level that opens to the lakeside for water toy storage. There’s off-street parking,  a small lakeside yard, and 76 feet of private frontage. The house was renovated and added onto in 2009, leaving this once basic property with a fresh look and a beautiful new master suite. There are three fireplaces here, which should interest you if you like the idea of sitting in a tree house overlooking the lake while the snow piles up outside. It’s a good feeling, a good scene, and with a 30 day close you could be enjoying New Year’s Eve in that exact fashion.

At the lakefront, there’s a massive pier, complete with oversized canopied boatslip and a large swim deck. It’s Linn Township, so the taxes are just $16k and change. This home is in terrific condition, ready for immediate use.  Why wait until May to join the race for summer? Start the race now. Tweak your new house over the winter.  Some new paint colors here,  some new couches there. Do the work in the off-season that so many people put off until the in-season. Take the winter to enjoy the scene, decorate the house, and prepare. When Memorial Day Weekend rolls around, you never again have to wonder which suburban BBQ you’re going to attend.

 

Stone Manor Saga
David Curry

Stone Manor Saga

In the news this week, more of the continuing saga surrounding Stone Manor. I suppose most of this story is my fault, so I should take some time to explain myself.  Several years ago I was hired to represent the marquee unit at Stone Manor. The first floor residence is as marquee as marquee gets, and since I’m the agent with the most success in that particular segment (no matter what the stapled letter you received in the mail from some other agent says), I was chosen to sell this space. After some market time,  I sold it for just under $6MM to a strong buyer.  As a point of fact, you won’t ever see me drop my client or customer names in this blog. That’s low-class and I’ll leave it for the online gossip pages to fill in the gaps that I intentionally leave empty.

After all, that’s what this story is all about. That’s why it has legs.  The story has personalities involved, and media types love a personality.  But again, here I am getting ahead of myself. The first floor unit sold in late 2016, and I was pleased to represent the seller. Stone Manor, for those who are unaware, features(d) several condominium units. There is a double unit and a single unit on the top floor, the same configuration on the second floor, and the large single floor unit that I sold on the first floor.  Shortly after the first floor unit sold to this buyer, a double on the top floor sold. Then, some fancy deed work between two owners, and ultimately the second floor double unit sold.   In November, the single unit on the second floor sold. That unit, by the way, was the unit owned by Tony Rezko, infamous associate of a prior president.

Even though the sales prices have been poorly or inaccurately reported,  the transfer returns point to sales prices as follows: First Floor: $5,995,000. Top Floor Double:  $1,899,667.  Second Floor Double: $3,400,000. Second Floor Single: $2,250,000.  The top floor double may have sold in a different manner to reflect that lower transfer price, but I’m not privy to any details, and those don’t matter. What matters now is that a singular owner now owns all of Stone Manor excepting one single top floor unit. The price paid so far? $13,544,667. This means every reported number you’ve read over recent weeks and months is wrong.

So now what? An owner who isn’t well known locally now owns nearly all of Stone Manor. The new owner has paid a handsome market rate for the property acquired.  And because of this, everyone is going insane. Local news reports on the purchases as if they’re somehow unexplainable. Los Angeles based bloggers can’t figure out what’s going on here. Why would someone want to own so much of a building in rural Wisconsin?  Has the world gone mad?  We demand answers. We must know. We have to know. What’s going on at Stone Manor?

The answer, is nothing.  Stone Manor is a monster limestone structure. It’s somewhere around 30,000 square feet. The property has 400′ of frontage and nearly 10 acres. It is, without question, the most important estate on this lake. No matter what other billionaire lakefront owners think, Stone Manor is actually the king.  And if you’re a lakefront owner or a lover of this lake, you should be thrilled that the property is on the verge of returning to single family ownership. Why would we bemoan a purchaser investing so much in our market? Why would we wish to understand this beyond what it looks like on the surface? It’s an owner who loves a property that had previously never been given much attention on the market, and that owner now seeks to turn 400′ of frontage into a singular estate. This matters, and we should be appreciative.

Let’s say the top floor holdout owner sells. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, it matters little to me. But if he does, and the price is in line with prior sales in the building (let’s not consider the alternatives for an owner who no longer has meaningful voting power in the condo structure), then the singular owner will have purchased the entirety of Stone Manor for around $16MM.  Want to know what Stone Manor, in its entirely is worth?  Probably around $16MM.  Has the new owner overpaid for this property? No. Does it matter if she did? No. Does it matter that she might be from California and her husband might be from New York? No.

My advice to the community is to recognize a compliment when paid one. This owner could choose to spend millions of dollars in any vacation home market in the world. She chose Lake Geneva. I, for one, am flattered by her interest, and as a caretaker of this market and this lake, I welcome the consolidation of ownership.  To that new owner, I say thank you. I say congratulations. I say welcome to the lake.

 

Thanksgiving
David Curry

Thanksgiving

Halloween is a stupid, fake holiday. There, I said it. It’s absolutely the worst fake holiday there is. I’ll take Sweetest Day over it, and I don’t even know when said day occurs.  Easter is a great holiday, even if my wife tells me it has pagan roots, just like Christmas. Both of those Holidays are not universally adored, because both are Christian holidays heavily connected in tradition and procedure to the aforementioned pagan celebrations.  Labor Day is nice, but is it? Memorial Day is something everyone can get behind, but this isn’t a Holiday with a season so much as a long weekend. Holidays, they’re confusing, and they’re different for each of us. Well, except one Holiday. The King of Holidays, Thanksgiving.

There is no one alive who wishes for Thanksgiving to go away.  Try to even imagine such a person.  Even Ebenezer Scrooge was well known to enjoy a Thanksgiving turkey, even while he displayed open disdain for the Christmas Goose. See, everyone likes Thanksgiving. Even Canadians and people who willingly vacation in Michigan.  Thanksgiving is the one weekend when everyone is in disagreement over something said at the table, or over the way something was prepared (my mom shouldn’t cook her turkey in an oversized crock pot), but when everyone is also in agreement. Thanksgiving is the best. That’s undisputed.

But what is thanksgiving? Not the capital T holiday, but the lower case t act? If we’re thankful, which we know we should be, to whom are we to be thankful? I admit I struggle with being thankful. I have a very hard time balancing being content and striving for more. I don’t know where the balance is. If I’m grateful and thankful, does this mean I’m content? It should, I think. But I admit that I am not. Ask my wife. I’m not predisposed to contentment, even if I am predisposed to be thankful. Indeed, shouldn’t one require the other? This is my personal struggle, the feeling of a unique form of driven anxiety coupled with an understanding that my life, while far from perfect,  has been pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Today, my children are healthy. My son is addicted to some Starwars video game, and my daughter hates homework, but things are, on balance, good. My wife is struggling with an unfortunate deer hunting incident from last weekend, wherein she was an unwilling accomplice to Buck murder,  but that’s a story for another time once the wound isn’t so fresh. Her figurative wound, not the Buck’s mortal wound. That wound isn’t fresh anymore. But still, my wife is well and my kids are well and I love them all dearly. I almost wrote deerly, in reference to the murdered Buck, but I didn’t think you’d get the joke.

This week, like every week, I’m going to try to be more thankful. To be more understanding. To be less frustrated and more content. This week, like every week, I’ll fail. But I adore Thanksgiving, and the way it brings a family together to give thanks for the many blessings that have been dropped squarely into our unworthy laps.  The thing is, while my family will have disagreements and spats this weekend (like every week), we know to whom we are thankful.  And that’s really what this Holiday is all about.  We’ll enjoy this week and keep with us an attitude of thankfulness to the bestower of these blessings.

 

Photo Courtesy Matt Mason Photography.
The Fall Of It All
David Curry

The Fall Of It All

I already know the sort of fall you like. I know the sort of fall everyone likes. It’s the fall we had last Saturday. Sunshine, 70 degrees, bright leaves and a deep blue lake.  A cloudless sky, excepting a few puffers pushed from the South and out to the East by a weekend wind. Boots and leaves, orchards and pumpkins. Walks along the shore path with dogs. Happy dogs. Happy people. Happy skies and happy days. This is nice that you’re so positive all the time, so nice that fall can behave like this, much to the delight of the fall enthusiast. Fall, it generously gives the soft people the fall they so badly desire.

But fall isn’t just like this. Fall gives to people like me, too. It’s not that I don’t love the above fall, I do. When I spent a few hours boating last Saturday with clients and friends, I wasn’t mad about this. The kids flopped around on the tube as we whipped from shore to shore, basking in the waning warm rays of 2017. I enjoyed it as much as anyone, but not more than anyone. I just enjoyed it, enough. But the time for that has past. The time for the soft fall is nearly over.  The opportunities for the casual fall enthusiast to stroll over bright, crisped leaves have just about expired. It’s still fall, mind you, still delicious, wonderful fall, but it’s about to be fall for the serious. Fall for the brooding. Fall for the hardened.

This fall comes with little warning.  Fall might blow bright on a Saturday and dull on a Sunday. When the crisp leaves no longer crunch and instead cling, gummed to the bottom of a nearly soaked boot, this is the fall that the masses dislike. It’s so wet, they’ll say. It’s so dark, my wife will say. It’s so muddy, someone else says.  It’s raw. The temperature might not break 50. If it does, it’ll settle at 51. The wind will blow. The leaves will strip. The gutters will clog. When we drive by the pumpkin patch we won’t hear laughter. No children searching for the perfect, orange gourd. We’ll just drive past without slowing and see the withering, muddied field, wondering why the farmer planted 10,000 pumpkins when he knew he’d only sell 600.  Real fall is full of second guessing.

This is the fall I love. The fall that’s dark. The fall that’s cold. The fall that might be wet and windy on Tuesday and dry and cloudy on a Wednesday. I don’t need the sun like you do. I need the comfort of a low sky. I crave the familiar of a late afternoon that already feels like evening, when the only lights visible are the window lamps, warming a room and reaffirming the distinct difference between inside and outside. In summer and in soft fall, the distinction is blurred. Windows are opened, doors left cracked open, wedged there by a fall boot that has no summer use. In the fall, the boundaries are once again established. Inside it’s warm and it’s soft and it’s comforting, the fire slowly consuming. Outside, the woodsmoke hangs just under that low sky and the deer walk quietly through the tall faded grass.

This is the fall I love. It might still be bright, some days. Peak leaves will be peaking this weekend, assuming they all haven’t been forced to the ground by the wind and the rain. It’s going to be cold this weekend. It’s cold now.  Some will run for the warmth of southern Florida. Others will wish they could escape the drear. The happy fall lovers will find this unsettling, while I’ll try to hide my enthusiasm. Because fall isn’t just for you. It’s for me, too.

 

 

Construction Sadness
David Curry

Construction Sadness

I’ve decided, in the wake of the Cubs miserable, awful, embarrassing performance this week, to make every post a sad one. Monday, Multiple Offer Sadness. Today, Construction Sadness. Friday, likely, NLCS Sweep Sadness.  For those not paying close attention, I have been building a small fishing cabin not too terribly far from Walworth County. It’s not super far, but it’s still far. It’s far enough that it breaks my own rule for vacation home proximity, which is similar to last week when I broke my own rule about not burning fires until such and such. The rain was a cold rain!  And in the case of this proximity breaker, the trout fishing was just not good enough closer to home.

My relationship with construction is complicated. Extremely complicated. On one hand, I crave it. I enjoy the creativity the process allows. I enjoy the implementation of a vision. Sometimes, it’s a vision that only I can see, and so I take great pride in delivering what no one else expected. Earlier in  my life, this took the form of remodeling projects. When visitors would stop during various stages of the disaster that is a gut remodel, they’d shake their heads. They’d tell me they don’t think it’s going to work. I paid too much. I improved too much. I was always disheartened by those words, but they fueled my desire to deliver a product that would defy their negativity. In the end, the projects all resulted in success.

The last few construction projects have been new builds, from the ground up. This process is different but still the same. It requires a vision, but mostly it requires dedication to the process. The last house I built is the house I live in now. I finished that home in 2013, and it’s been a dandy of a house for me and my family. The construction process at that house was unique, in that I built the home when the market was poor which meant plenty of tradespeople were willing to work for reasonable wages. Further, those who weren’t affordable were available, and the project started in September and finished the next May. The current project is a handful of highway hours away, in a county where no one knows me and I know no one, in a region where work is a nice suggestion but not really something toward which anyone feels a particular fondness.

Once the land was purchased (that took two full years of searching), the project began. It was a modest project. 1200 square feet, give or take. A rectangle of a house with a tall gable and some cedar shingles. Much to the horror of this Lake Geneva market, I stained the shingles black. Like the night (my wife did much of the staining).  The bathrooms were lined with marble, or are, at least in theory, in the process of being lined with marble. My tile guy hasn’t reported for duty for a few months, but I’m sure he has a terrific reason.

When ground was first torn up by the rusted dozer that cut a twisty path up the side of that hill, the goal was to have the house finished in four months.  Maybe four and a half. Maybe less.  The dozer cut that path 16 months ago. The house is not yet finished. In fact, the house is not even close to being finished. I tell my wife that it’s almost done, and then I look over the list of things remaining. Trim, paint, floors, tile, bathrooms, plumbing, kitchen cabinets, countertops, appliances. It’s really not much of a list, or so go the unconvincing lies I repeatedly tell myself. The project, once a chorus of so much enthusiasm and light, has turned into a dirge.

The process has, however, afforded me many lessons. I sympathize on a deeper level with my Illinois clients who have a hard time getting contractors to do work here. I understand customers who are embroiled in multi-month, multi-year construction projects. How can something take so long? It just can. And I understand that better now.  In spite of the deep construction based depression that has consumed me, this project has given me an opportunity to practice what I preach. Give the market what it doesn’t expect. If the market expects carpet give it hardwood. Make it wide plank. If the market expects vinyl, give it cedar. If ceramic bathrooms with one piece plastic showers are good, then line the bathroom in marble. If Home Depot light fixtures light the neighboring comps, send all of your money to Restoration Hardware and use their lights instead. Markets give clues as to what construction standard is acceptable. If the market is nuanced and there’s an opportunity to create value by creating a superior product, then create it.

Lake Geneva Market Update
David Curry

Lake Geneva Market Update

When times were particularly bad and getting worse, I hatched a particular theory.  The theory supposed that in spite of the various factors that we know prod consumers to buy and sell homes, things like interest rates and employment and marriage, there’s really only one thing that makes real estate markets move. In bad times, it’s fear. If you have $10MM in the bank and your $2MM home is only worth $1.7MM, do you need to sell it? Of course not. Then why sell it for $1.6MM? The answer, which we can only know now, is that you sell at $1.6MM because you’re afraid next month it’ll be $1.5MM. That’s why this market moved like it did from 2009 through 2012, because of fear.

And if it’s fear that drives a declining market to lower lows, then it must be the opposite that drives an escalating market to higher highs. Job growth is great, but it doesn’t fuel the top end at Lake Geneva. Interest rates are important, but are they? Stock market return are incredibly important to this vacation home market, and with steady returns piling up it makes sense that consumer confidence is as robust as it is. The opposite of fear is confidence, and it’s that confidence that’s driving the Lake Geneva market. And it’s driving super fast.

Another week, more contracts. More offers. More sellers wondering if their house is next, more buyers buying homes they didn’t know they needed but now can’t live without. There are 30 lakefront homes available this morning, per the MLS. Of those 30, nine are under contract. That makes just 21 available lakefronts.  Of those 21, several have active offers being negotiated. 20 true lakefront homes have already sold in 2017, leaving us to assume that we’ll break the 30 home mark for 2017.  Last year was a banner year, and we only closed 24 true lakefronts (MLS). If we break 30 this year, it’ll be even more important to remember that in 2007 we only sold 17 lakefronts. This new norm is really, really something.

This week, a lakefront closing. That of Kerry Wood’s house in Fontana. At $4.7MM it’s an okay sale. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. I’m ambivalent, which is how I feel about baked cod and maple syrup.  It’s a lofty sale for the frontage (102′), and the location (mostly homes valued under $2MM in the immediate neighborhood). It’s proof, once again, that our market loves new(er) homes, and will do just about anything to own them.

More contracts this week as well. A new contract on my listing in the Elgin Club. A new contract on a large Fontana lakefront listed in the $6s. A new contract on the non-lakefront modern home ($1.85MM) that sits on the cliff overlooking Fontana Bay.  A new contract on the house next to the Lake Geneva Country Club ($3.095MM), and a new contract on the Main Street, Lake Geneva lakefront ($2.495MM) that sits near the Library Park.  Hillcroft, that big estate with an older house that anchors 415′ of Snake Road lakefrontage is still pending ($12.5MM), as is the spec home in Williams Bay ($3.85MM) and the Circle Parkway lakefront ($2.95MM).  My South Shore Club lakefront also remains under contract ($4.595MM). Rounding out this flurry of activity is the small home on Marianne Terrace in Lake Geneva that’s under contract ($1.799MM).  The market is searingly hot. Breathlessly hot.

Do you think every deal is a good deal? Absolutely not.  Some of the deals I see are pretty awful. Embarrassing, really. But that ties in with Monday’s bit, so you already know how terrible this is. Still, the market is moving and there’s plenty of room left in 2017 for it to move further. Are prices increasing? Well, yes, they are. The wood sale just printed at $47,000 per front foot. That’s not the average, but a few of those in a year will skew our 2017 average to the very high end.  Continue to expect sales as we finish the year, and continue to expect many of these sales to be carried out by buyers who really should have done some more homework before they docusigned on the dotted line.

Above, my dynamite Loramoor listing.

 

Lake Geneva Agent Representation
David Curry

Lake Geneva Agent Representation

We know lots of things. We know that if we don’t cut our grass once a week it will grow too tall and too thick, and when we cut it after the week off we know that the cutting will be difficult. It would have been easier to mow it last week. Once in a while, it’s good to let it go and struggle through the off-week cutting, to remind oneself not to skip the lawn. In the same way, we know we should floss our teeth. It’s a good habit, this flossing. I floss, sure, but when sitting in the dentist chair I have to both admit it’s not twice a day and then endure the chastising reminder. Flossing, it’s good.

In the same way, there are certain real estate things that everyone needs to remember. This is your Monday reminder. In an attempt to make this exceptionally easy reading today, I’ll distill the reminders down to just one.  What I’m asking you, no, what I’m begging you to remember, is so simple. It’s nothing complicated. It’s not painful like mowing too-tall of grass, or annoying, like flossing stupid back teeth. It’s so easy, anyone can do it. Best of all, this thing you must do doesn’t cost you any money. In fact, it will likely save you money, and also save you from the heaps of shame that accompanies the forgetting of this thing.

In part, I blame the internet for the way it has made all real estate, and all markets, feel the same. When zooming over a map of a county on Zillow, all the consumer sees is a “market”. A house here for $4MM, a house over there for $400k. A house down the road for $1.1MM and one over here for $200k. The market, when viewed through the lens of a smartphone, looks small and quaint. In the same way, an agent in Middleton is the same as an agent in Madison, is the same as an agent in Milwaukee. It’s all one state, and it’s a midwestern state at that, which means it must be simple and it must be easy.  For the Zillow tells us so.

I’ll tell you a secret about Lake Geneva. When an agent has a listing that he or she knows is overpriced and/or a very difficult sale, guess what we hope happens? Of course we hope the listing sells. That’s our job, to work and to hope. But we really hope a buyer shows up who is tethered to an agent who isn’t from our market. Make it an agent from out of state and our eyes light up at the naivety of it all. A buyer working with an inexperienced agent, or one who isn’t from our market, is a buyer that will likely make mistakes. If we’re the listing side of a grossly overpriced property, we hope you make the mistake soon.

This is the problem, and this is the reminder. Stop working with agents that don’t know the market. It seems so obvious, so elementary. Yet the market is full of buyers working with agents who aren’t active in the particular segment they’re attempting to sell.  There’s a reason I don’t go to Door County and sell real estate on Thursdays. There’s a reason I don’t go to  Bayfield on Wednesdays and Elm Grove on Fridays. I’m pretty good at this real estate game, and I know my limitations. If I don’t know a market I’m not going to represent myself as an expert in that market. It’s just that easy.

If you’re a lakefront buyer seeking a Geneva Lake property, is it in your best interest to walk into a real estate office on a Saturday and sign up with the agent standing in front of you? Would you visit the walk-in clinic to have your kidney transplant performed? Real estate is not as complicated as surgery, but the analogy of a surgery taking place is indeed accurate in that real estate surgery involves removing too much money directly from your pocket. If you’re looking for a $3MM home in  Hinsdale, work with an agent who routinely sells $3MM homes in Hinsdale. If you’re looking for a $200k condo in Lake Geneva, work with an agent who routinely sells $200k condos in Lake Geneva. And if you’re looking for a $3MM lakefront home on Geneva, work with the agent who routinely sells $3MM homes on Geneva. And if you have a dentist appointment tomorrow, start flossing right now.

 

 

 

Fall At The Lake
David Curry

Fall At The Lake

Of the things we know to expect during an autumn here, 95 degree sunshine is not among them. The heat is rare, but in a summer devoid of any lasting heat, I don’t know how we could do anything but welcome this heat with open, sweaty arms. It’ll be cold soon, consistently cold, where the days that hit 60 will be the summery ones. We’ll delight in those days, saying they’re too warm to wear a sweater, and we’ll sweat just a bit and we’ll be happy. For now, the green is fading but the summer remains, which leaves us little choice but to hold onto it like grim death.

This is something we don’t expect, but there are now market things we should expect. If we don’t expect them, that’s because we’re working with the wrong Realtor, which isn’t so much my fault as it is yours. The things you should expect are both obvious and yet, many of them are contradictory. That’s Lake Geneva in a single sentence. It makes perfect sense as long as you understand that sometimes up is down and often down is up and expensive properties sell so long as they have a Wolf range or so long as you’re the buyer who just latched onto a Realtor that you met because that Realtor was working floor time at the office on a weekend.

Sellers. It’s September, and sellers who haven’t yet sold are a bit concerned. Some are, some aren’t, but the general theme amongst aged inventory is some cautious concern.  There are two things that must now happen. First, asking prices should soften. This is not going to be the case for all sellers, but for some, prices will adjust as sellers look toward the off season. Second, what off season? Our market will remain vibrant up through Thanksgiving and beyond, with just a seasonal adjustment being made for Holiday weeks when only the faithful few will be actively buying and selling. The key for sellers is to understand the market remains hot, and will remain so, no matter if our 90s fade to 50s. Lake Geneva is still king, and kings do not relinquish their crowns when the temperatures drop, they just wrap themselves in some fine custom garments.

Buyers.  There are lots of you out there, and lots of you are making terrible, terrible mistakes. I try to warn you, but some of you insist on waltzing into real estate offices and make the assumption that the warm body in front of you is going to be your best chance at securing lakefront, or lake access value. This is sadly not the case, but you keep doing it anyway. There’s a funny game we can play. It’s called look at properties that no one thought would sell for the prices they sold for, and often you can find the selling agent to be an agent that doesn’t routinely work the lakefront market. To be certain, all agents are not created equal, though agents love to attempt to punch above their weight in the lakefront market because the prize money is alluring. Agents who sell $205k ranches in Elkhorn are not the agents who routinely sell $3MM houses on Geneva Lake. I’m begging you to understand this.

But for buyers there are still deals to be had. There is aged inventory that has been fielding and rebuffing offers all year, and those properties might be open to negotiations.  My recent experience is that sellers are still far too confident. Solid offers are being declined, because there is too much optimism. Sellers don’t seem to understand that 9/10s of a bird in the hand is so much better than 10/10s of a bird in the bush. This is what the game has come down to- fractions of lofty valuations- and sellers are proving their lack of real estate prowess by routinely ignoring solid, market bids.

If we’re buyers, does this mean we give up and look to another lake that might more feature more motivated sellers? Just because it’s September does this mean we wear boots and jeans when it’s 95 and sunny?

Above, my Elgin Club lakefront, now $1.925MM. It is, in my infallible, expert opinion, the best lakefront on the market priced under $2.5MM.
Sell The Lake Geneva Riviera
David Curry

Sell The Lake Geneva Riviera

In a recent Lake Geneva Regional News article, City of Lake Geneva Alderman John Halverson, when discussing the state of the Lake Geneva Riviera and a desired multi-million dollar referendum for repairs asked, “If we don’t get it passed, what should we do? Sell the building?”

I’m so glad he asked, so that I can answer.  Yes. That’s the answer. Sell the building. The question was posed rhetorically, in a way that would suppose a yes answer would be ludicrous, even sacrileges. But the best way for the City of Lake Geneva to deal with the aging Riviera and the several million dollars of repairs it supposedly needs is to sell the building to the highest bidder. To keep the building beyond 2017 would be a significant mistake, and would prove once again that the city has no regard for the tax payers who already pay the highest rates around the lake.

I’m not suggesting the building be sold in a traditional manner, wherein the new owner would have the flexibility to do with it as he or she pleases. I’m suggesting that the city utilize the power of deed restrictions and covenants to clear an aging liability from their books.  The Riviera is a most impressive structure, and its unique location and design lends a visual boost to downtown Lake Geneva and that commercialized lakefront scene. The structure has anchored downtown for generations, and should be respected.   In the 1930s my grandmother would ride the train up with her sisters to dance at the ballroom on Saturday nights. She met my grandpa there, while he was hawking popcorn or cigarettes or newspapers. The Riviera has a deep and important history, and the building itself should be preserved. That’s why the property should be sold. Here’s how it could work.

The city slaps deed restrictions on the property, dictating the allowable future uses and the exterior design and color palette of the structure. What happens to the interior shouldn’t be any concern of the city, especially once they receive a few million dollars for the building.  With the deed restrictions in place, the aesthetics of the Riviera and the setting will be secure, no matter who owns the deed. There are options as to how to sell the space. The city could rezone the building into a condominium, and retain the lower level retail spaces to be operated as they are today. The problem with this model is that the city would then still be on the hook for repairs, that’s why it’s best to sell the entire structure. Separate the park from the building, retain the park (the fountain, etc), and sell just the building. The entire thing.

Who buys it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe one of the nearby local business would like added square footage? Maybe the cruise line operating from the adjacent city pier system?  The cruise line could utilize the space for some offices and use the ballroom for a wedding venue, just as it is used today. The difference is that rates could be increased exponentially from those paltry sums the city charges, and the building could be modernized to host more events.  Some might suggest the increased usage of the facility would be a negative for the city. I’d argue that the structure is a ballroom. It wasn’t built to sit idle. It was built to host bands and dances and parties of epic proportions. Why not let the private market return the building to its original intent?

The city has estimated the repairs to be in the neighborhood of $5MM. My estimates that I’ve considered now for all of five minutes prove that the cost would be significantly less. The problem is municipalities pay retail plus for everything they do (just check on the cost of school construction for proof). The private market could handle those repairs for less than a million dollars, likely with ease. Yes, a new owner would have to undertake these repairs, which drives up the initial investment. Yes, the fact that the city has broadcast these repairs to the world means a buyer will use the city’s figures against them in a negotiation.  Yes, that might mean the building sells for less than it might otherwise sell for. But the alternative is worse. The alternative is the city taxes its vacation home owners to fix up a building that loses money. To repair the Riviera on the taxpayer’s dime is the very definition of throwing good money after bad.

The idea of selling the Riviera hasn’t been discussed much in public, but it’s time the conversation begins. There is no reason for a city to own such a valuable liability. Deed restrict it. Zone it to allow very few select future uses, and sell it to the highest bidder. Since I am nothing if not a fan of Lake Geneva, I’ll even offer to sell the building for the city at a reduced commission rate.

Summer Night
David Curry

Summer Night

There is some thought, rampant among those who cannot yet know, that a night is a night is a night. The night it dark here, just like there, in fact like every night. Night.  Those who love the night take great pride in this universal truth, that night is dark and it’s dark everywhere. In the daytime everything can be different. Every place its own, each unique. Some places with high mountains and cold rivers, others with wide plains and low, wet marsh. Some other places teeming with dark leafy trees and little dotted lakes, clear perhaps. Daytime, now that’s different because it looks different. But in the night when there’s nothing to see, each place is the same: dark and quiet.

But that’s not at all true. The night is filled with sounds, each season its own, each place its own. A winter night under a brilliant cold sky is something to behold. The deep, snowy still of a leafless and seemingly lifeless field contrast under the brilliantly bright stars.  But it’s not something one can savor. It’s too cold to dwell, and in, and so a winter night is something gulped in deep breaths and left alone. It’s still night outside, but inside with the wood fire and the warm lamp light is much more comforting.

A fall night is a noisy night, a windy night, some rain maybe. But that’s not entirely true. A fall night can be as alive as a summer night, or as still as a winter night, or it might be anything in between. There’s no rule for fall, nothing it must do. What it will do is build to a colorful crescendo just before it ebbs and falls silent. Fall is like winter without snow, unless it isn’t.

But those summer nights. In our memories, they all sound the same.  Crickets and hoppers, chirping and singing their redundant tune. Softly fading as the night wears on, only to be replaced by the chirping of song birds once the morning light is near.  This is what night at my house sounds like. My house, surrounded by prairie and distant trees, alive with the casual rhythm of so many field bugs. An occasional rustle in the grass, a rabbit hiding from a fox. A coyote clinking through the wooded edges, thinking about which chicken it will steal. There are other characters in this prairie night, but the stars are those bugs that I cannot identify, crudely scratching out the sound that I’ve come to love. Summer days can wear on me, but the sound of a summer night has yet to grow old.

I spent a few hours last week on a lakeside screened porch. The sounds were those of my childhood, a slow churning boat pushing through the night, returning its guests after dinner. Or the other boats, the large boats with parties aboard, spinning around the lake and clearing each point,  the dull murmur of the happy crowd reaching across the window and to my childhood bedroom. But what struck me wasn’t the familiar sound of a few slow boats. It was the quiet of it all. It was the distinct sound of a Geneva lakefront porch.  The steady but louder pitch of the cicadas, a sound I know well but one that I don’t hear at my prairie house. The quiet hush of leaves flittering in a late night lake breeze.  Next time you think a summer night is a summer night, spend one in a screened porch next to Geneva Lake. You’ll soon be like me, well aware of the privilege of a summer night anywhere, but equally aware that there is one place where that night is better. At the lake.

 

700 South Lakeshore Sells
David Curry

700 South Lakeshore Sells

When I listed this property last August, I knew exactly what it was. It wasn’t the most perfect house on the lake. The kitchen wasn’t exactly the current style. But it was 4 acres and 162 of frontage with so much square footage and so many resort-style amenities. The house had been listed off and on for what felt like ages, as if anyone really knows exactly what an “age” feels like. Still, the property was repositioned with the help of a fresh perspective and some fresh marketing efforts and I was pleased to work for that seller to get that property sold.

Last Friday, I sold 700 South Lakeshore in the city of Lake Geneva for $5,900,000. The sale is the fifth over $5,000,000 since the start of last year. Of those five sales, I’ve represented the seller in four of them. I’m not really sure now what else I can do to help convince the upper bracket market that I’m the man to handle these luxury listings. Perhaps the secret will be unlocked after I sell five out of the last six…

While I’m happy for the seller who now gets to move on to the next chapter of her life, I’m exceptionally pleased for the buyer. This is a new lake owner, with a new reason to look forward to the weekend. There’s something extra rewarding about selling a lake house to a first time Lake Geneva owner.  They don’t yet know what they’re in for, but I do. We do.  A very special thank you to this seller and buyer who allowed me to help bring this sale together.

Colors
David Curry

Colors

By now, we all know that things haven’t been going our way. We started out with that winter, so intent on enjoying it and skiing it and sledding it, scraping and shoveling it, too. But what happened wasn’t anything like that. We skied, a bit. Shoveled, a bit. Scraped, some. But the winter had come and the winter has left and nothing really happened. It was a winter without. We knew what would come next, and we waited and we waited and in February it came. Bright spring. Sunny spring. Warm and soft, spring.

That was a few days, maybe four, and it was February and no one thought it was really spring. Winter returned, but it was easy winter, annoying winter, just enough winter to ward off spring.  That winter relapse was quickly forgotten and there have been days of spring, days of warm, soft sun, and days of wicked wind, biting cold. Then the rains came, so many rains with so much water, sheets and sheets and buckets and buckets. No one thought it could last, but it did, and it washed our streets and soaked our lawns and filled our lakes.  The season isn’t so much spring, it’s just a rainy winter.

There are barns between my house and this desk. Many barns. Most are clad in metal, some form of sheet paneling either vertical or horizontal, typically in fleshy tones of white, gray, or brown. In the winter landscape, these barns blend in, offering no excitement, no allure, just utilitarian usefullness. But there is one barn painted the brightest of reds, and in the winter it is a beacon on my drive, a visual reminder that color exists even in the dullest of dark winters. In the spring, too, when the ground is gray and what isn’t is brown, and the tans of the cut corn stalks and the dull olive of the roadside grass means everything is quiet and stark, that barn shines bright and vivid, a reminder of color in an otherwise colorless world.

But these rains and this sky and this gray and this brown, it’s not all bad. My eyes can rest under this sky. There’s no strain here, no squint to see beyond the glow, because there is no glow. It’s just March in Wisconsin and things are easy on the eyes. The north side of Geneva Street is greening this morning.  The grass is greening and the bulbs are shooting and the crocus is blooming. The dull wrens of winter are being crowded out by the orange breasted robins of spring, and soon, the elusive Orioles will coast in on a southerly breeze in search of our fresh cut oranges and our purple grape jelly.  The piers are falling into place, now dulled and chipped by the winter but soon scraped and painted and bright again. The water is warming, slowly, but it’s warming and it’s still blue, even in the face of so much gray it is still blue. The grass is greening and the flowers are awakening and the sky is brightening and soon it’ll be the spring we’ve seen in our minds all winter. Prepare your eyes, the color is coming.

 

Photo courtesy Kirsten Westlake

 

Walworth County Market Update
David Curry

Walworth County Market Update

When you’re a Realtor, you’re supposed to want to do everything you can to sell anything you can. You’re supposed to pay attention to every segment within your market, to the goings on in the rental world, to the commercial things, to vacant land and to that cute bungalow in town. The one near the school.  Realtors are told to be experts. In the next breath, they’re told to be always available, always present, always here for whomever it is that requires service. This is all a terrible mistake, and not coincidentally, this desire to do all things is the reason that most agents can’t achieve success.

Now, take this guy on the other hand. I don’t really want to do any business that isn’t the sort of business I want. If you own a wonderful apartment building in Elkhorn, I’m super happy for you. But I don’t know enough about the rental market in Elkhorn and the desired returns of that particular investor community, so I can’t (and won’t) successfully work with you. I’m not a commercial guy. In the same way, I don’t know anything about the single family housing market in Darien. I heard it’s okay. Taxes are high. That’s all I know, and as such, you wouldn’t be doing yourself any favor if you were to wish for my services in Darien.

The benefit of this narrow focus is as obvious as the detriment. I am not all things to all markets. I’m all things to one market. That’s my goal, and that’s my life, and I’ve made a decent little living serving only one master. But today isn’t about me, no matter how well I’ve done so far to leave you with that impression. Today is about the broad Walworth County market. Today isn’t about Lake Geneva, it’s about everywhere else. The markets in these other areas are thriving. Absolutely, positively, thriving.

Want to buy a little cottage on Cherry Street in Williams Bay for less than $200k? So did someone else. The house is pending. Want to buy a vinyl ranch in Lakewood Trails? Yeah, so does everyone else. Feel like a little starter house in Delavan for $69k? Too late. It sold. How’s about a late 80s raised ranch, complete with some sort of brown brick and a mismatched brown roof? Pending.  Delavan is doing well, except on the lakefront, where there appears to be just one home pending sale today. Earlier, I meant to say everywhere is going fantastic, except Delavan Lake.

Want to find a reasonably decent house on 3-5 acres in the country somewhere? Nowhere in particular, just somewhere around here-ish?  Ideally under $400k. Good luck! Those homes are selling at a feverish pace, and inventory is low.  Darien has 14 homes available, five are under contract.  Elkhorn has 34 homes for sale. 18 of those are under contract. Nine others are pending sale.  That’s absolutely remarkable if you think about it. Amazing, really. Well done, sub-$250k buyer. You’re buying, and you’re smart.

Why is the primary market here doing so well?  It’s thriving today because the prices are still modest, still reasonable, still affordable. The interest rates are low but rising, and this market is super sensitive to rates, and to the threat of increased monthly costs. The primary market is performing well, but over $350k that strength dries up. Consider the city of Lake Geneva, where 40 homes are available today. Of those 40, 25 are priced under $350k. Of those 25,  ten are under contract. Another four are pending.  Over $350k? Not a single under contract or pending sale.

And all of that makes solid sense. The primary housing market is driven by those people who work here, and most of the jobs in a resort market are the sorts of jobs that can support home ownership on a modest level. A nice Walworth County job can buy a $275k colonial on a lot that was home to corn not so long ago, but most Walworth County jobs cannot support purchases over $350k.  But this isn’t about jobs and it isn’t about interest rates and it isn’t about me. It’s just about the primary housing market, and today I tip my hat to a vibrant market segment that I have absolutely nothing to do with.

 

Photo courtesy Kristen Westlake.
Peace
David Curry

Peace

In the stillness of an anywhere field, there’s a stream that babbles and weaves and spills. The stream is loud.  There are birds both quiet and noisy, some fiddling about to themselves and others calling in friends, mates, or warning others to steer well clear. A deer in the distance makes no sound, slowly chewing the most tender blades of fresh spring grass.  Two rabbits hop as rabbits do, barely crunching the dried winter leaves they bound over. There’s a soft quiet hum to this distant field, a peaceful way in which every noisemaker plays their part in this unintentional orchestra. The sounds of this field on this day are the sounds that anyone can hear in the background of whatever their noisy present might be.

The lake on that July Sunday is so blue. The waves are pushed by so much wind, starting in the southwest and blowing to the northeast, breaking all the way. These winds are steady, eight or nine knots, the sailors would guess. The steady crash of the waves against the shore provide the unexpected percussion.  The trees sway, so many maples and oaks and walnuts rocking back and forth. The white noise of the day, some others would say. Something you can hear but easily ignore.  There’s a quiet bass of a distant Streblow, or is it a Shepard?  Children splashing at the pier two doors down, the soft squeals of city children as they find confidence in jumping off the outer horse post.   Fishermen ply the waters, flipping their silly jigs towards the piers and under the buoy tied boats. Those boats, they click and they clack when their buoy chain bumps the clasp of their bow. A couple walk the shore path, no words are spoken.   The day wears on, the boats change, the shore path leads the way, and the wind slowly falls as the sun dips low.

Is one of these two scenes more peaceful than the other? Is the sound of a stream in a wildflower field any more serene than a steady parade of waves marching from one end of this big lake to the other?  Does a breeze blown tree in a lakefront lawn make for a different background than a breeze blown tree in the middle of the darkest, loneliest woods? Is a stream-side lunch any different than a lakeside lunch, eaten over wicker table in the cool porch shade? Is there any difference in quality between peaceful solitude and peaceful company? Is the sound of a distant car making its way down a gravel road somehow preferable to the sound of a Cobalt heading West towards the setting sun?

I love Lake Geneva, but good luck finding any peace and quiet. I love Lake Geneva, but there’s no solitude. I love Lake Geneva, but there’s no place to just rest.  These are the comments of those who visit our lake but have not yet found the time to understand our lake.  The magic of this place is not in its tourist-centric downtown, nor in the way boats can clog the outer ring of the lake on any given weekend. No, the magic of this place is in its ability to make a lakeside porch,  pier, or patio, complete with the background noise of lapping waves, rumbling boats, and children splashing in the shallows, one of the most peaceful places to read a book. To nap. To eat a summer lunch. To be still.  There’s no trick to making a place void of people peaceful. Even Michigan can do that.  The real trick is making a place so full of company a place where solitude is simple to find. Where rest comes easily. Where peace comes not with complete silence, but with the lovely hum of an unmistakable summer soundtrack.

Lake Geneva Market Conditions
David Curry

Lake Geneva Market Conditions

I had a dream last night. In the dream I was just myself, no one else. I wasn’t able to fly, or able to breath under water; nothing terrific like that. I was just a Realtor in this dream, going about my Realtor business. I was in a living room, someone else’s living room, not a room I had been in before. It wasn’t a very nice living room, but it was okay, I guess. In dreams, decor rarely matters.

The seller was someone I knew. A kid I knew a few years ago, he couldn’t be more than 22 now, as he was in the dream. He was sitting in his house, except in real life it is his parent’s house, but not in dreams. It was his house and he wanted to know how much it was worth.  He kept repeating three million dollars. He was intent. Three million dollars. Maybe three million five hundred thousand dollars. He wasn’t sure.

I was uncomfortable in the dream. I wanted to hear him out, to listen to the myriad reasons his house was worth this much money, and so I sat on the couch as he pointed to comps. The comparables were indeed nice homes, lakefront homes, big ones and fancy ones and I had sold many of them. I nodded along with his charismatic plea. Three million dollars.

When it was my turn I explained that those homes were large lakefront homes, and that his home was a small A-frame located two blocks from the lake. He sat back in his chair, feigning disgust at my lack of enthusiasm. I used the example of the Knollwood house that sold two years ago for $2.2MM, and said that the only reason that home sold for such an incredible number was because the home was so amazing. It was perfect, I said. Luxe Magazine, I said. Three million dollars, he said.

When I sensed I was making some progress with him, I asked what he had into the house. He said $300k. I said, “you mean your parents had $300k into it”. He smiled and acknowledged that yes, it was his parents’ money and their investment, not his. I told him he’d be lucky to get $400k for the house, but that he shouldn’t be so upset because that’s a lot of money for a kid his age. The dream ended without any further commentary. I’m uncertain if I got the listing, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t want it anyway.

This was a dream, but this is my life today. The market at Lake Geneva is filling with competition, I should say, with other agents whom, no matter their lack of knowledge or prior success, are intent on telling the world of their proficiency. The competition isn’t that, but it looks like it when you drive around and see names on signs that you’ve never seen before. It’s a market chock full of agents, of open houses, or letters and websites and Instagram hashtags. Experts are everywhere. Things are changing, and it’s the competition in the business of real estate that’s often bad for the consumer.

And that comes back to my dream. Sellers know the market is hot. They know it because all 500 some agents in Walworth County are telling them. Hot. Hot. Hot. And so agents are bidding up the listing prices of houses, especially lakefront houses on Geneva Lake, and sellers are feeling flattered by all the attention. The dream I had was just that, a dream, but it’s based on the reality of this season. Sellers, a note of caution. A hot market means there are market buyers for your house. Someone might even pay 5-10% more than the market value if they love it enough. But if we take the bait and price homes too high just because there’s a slight chance we’ll get away with it, we’re going to damage the market by filling it with overpriced homes that will, ultimately, drag on the market and put downward pressure on the unrealistic listing prices.

Buyers, work with an agent who knows the market because they’ve proven that they sell the market. Sellers, work with an agent who knows the market because they’ve proven that they sell the market. This isn’t really that hard.

Lake Geneva News
David Curry

Lake Geneva News

I try my best to avoid involving myself with the municipal governments in this area. I care deeply about what happens here, about the future, about the way the whole thing seems to be turning out. That’s why I fight development, because it’s unnecessary and it’s evil and I wish Chicago developers would worry more about Chicago developments than rural ones. I shy away from fighting with the municipalities over things I feel are wrong, because the fight here is skewed and largely unfair. That’s because the tax base is large, owing that entirely to the vacation home set and their weekend homes, and yet the voting and decisions are carried out solely by those who live here full time.  The residents vote to spend the tax money of their neighbors who don’t have a say in the matter. That irritates me, and so I generally let sleeping, bloated, tax ladened dogs lie.

But sometimes it’s all too much, and I need to say a few words about the local happenings. And so here it goes. First up, more rumors and innuendo and hushed threats over the Geneva Inn. This is the old hotel on the southeast corner of the lake that used to be known as the Shore Club. This restaurant/hotel is in Linn Township, but the city of Lake Geneva covets it, and the development groups who eye it routinely wish to annex it to the city of Lake Geneva so that they can obtain city water and sewer. There’s much to discuss here, but there’s only one thing that matters. Development in this corner of the lake would be bad for the area. We do not need more development here, no matter what shape it takes, and we certainly don’t need some circus on that end of the lake. If you care about the lake and you like things the way they are, email the City of Lake Geneva and tell them to deny any annexation requests or development requests for the Geneva Inn.

Speaking of the city, there’s a new restaurant being built next to Popeye’s. Oak Fire Pizza, it might be two words not three, bought their building a few years ago. They renovated the building. They opened and they served me pizza that was decent, but soggy in the middle. Then they tore the building down and now they’re erecting a new building, to serve pizza. It’s a big gamble, a huge expense, but this is a good thing for the area. I don’t like development, this is obvious, but re-development of existing things should be encouraged, always. Lake Geneva is at a bit of an intersection these days. On one hand, rents are too high and certain marquee locations are sitting empty, an obvious sign of landlord/tennant disputes over reasonable rental rates. On the other hand, renovation and expansion is occurring, which cannot be anything but good so long as that expansion is simply replacing the tattered with the shiny, and not inventing new locations to cram the shiny.

Williams Bay likes money. They like it a lot. That’s why they several years ago approved an auto repair shop to be built on their main drag, just a few hundred feet from the lake. Any reasonable town with a reasonable eye towards the future would have denied this request, but Williams Bay is eager to play with the big boys like Fontana and Williams Bay and so they approve things that shouldn’t be approved. Like when the Williams Bay School Board pulled a fast one on the town and was allowed to collect tax dollars to fund the demolition of the old school building but then decided, instead, to sell the school building and pocket the dedicated funds. Williams Bay now wants to build a fire house. A new, shiny fire house. The fire house will cost a couple million because why not? We need a new fire house because the old one is too small for $500k fire trucks, and there aren’t even sleeping rooms in the old fire house. I can’t figure out why a volunteer fire department who battles fires on such an infrequent basis would need to sleep at their fire house. Baby, don’t treat me bad, indeed. Tell the Village of Williams Bay to knock it off, fire houses are for cities, silly.  On the heels of building a $20MM grade school, it takes a significant amount of gall to expect tax payers to fund a new firehouse of such royal proportions.

Speaking of easy tax dollars, a massive TIF grant was awarded to the new owner of the Geneva Theatre. Geneva 4, it’s called. I watched Hot Shots there from the front row, my neck crooked skyward, because it was 1991 and we rode our bikes there and we were late. The theatre has been in disrepair for ages, and so a new buyer surfaced last year and the city handed out bushels of tax dollars to aid in the renovations. The theatre now looks interesting,  art deco ish, but interesting. It was supposed to open on March 1st, but it didn’t. It’s supposed to open today, but who knows if it will. I asked the theatre manager for a tour of the property this week but was ignored, so perhaps they don’t want me to write nice things about their efforts.  I can’t tell you if they’re opening or not, but judging by the number of construction trucks outside the theatre yesterday it appears as though they’re giving max effort. The theatre will be open by summer, that we can be sure of, and it would be nice of you to visit it. I’m happy something was done here, and I’m happy the theatre remains a theatre and not a handful of t-shirt shops.

The biggest threat to the Lake Geneva market is not from outside forces. It’s not from greedy developers. The biggest threat is from within. It’s from the boards that run these small towns, the board members who so badly wish to matter. They want to make a splash, for the children they say, for the future. For this and for that, but the efforts are almost always guided by cliche and misunderstood standards that are rarely, if ever, challenged. Development does not make a community better.  Fire houses with sleeping quarters are not necessary. Hotels should be hotels, not water parks with carnivals surrounding them. The county and municipalities need to protect this lake, to protect the interests of those who make their living here at the same time as they protect those who fund all of this with their generous tax dollars. The best path forward is always one of caution, and when markets get hot caution is the narrowest of paths.

March
David Curry

March

There’s a thing about March. It is, without any question, the worst month of the year. If you disagree, that’s fine, but I know deep down inside that I’m right. This is the key to winning arguments.  It’ll probably snow in March. It might snow today. It’ll probably be 65 in March, maybe 70. There is no ice left, that’s true of this March but not a typical March. What’s typical? March doesn’t know. March has no idea what it is, just that it came in like a lion and so it must go out like a lamb. March has no choice but to be the in between. Not winter, not spring, just something. A month, a space filler, a void. Ugliness, it will be at home here in March.

February, that’s winter all the way. Except this last February, where it was only a bit of winter but really none at all. It was spring. February showers bring May flowers, because in March, what could grow? February showers do nothing but wash some of the grit from the road and leave us wondering if we should rake out the fall leaves that accumulated behind our summer bushes, or if we should just put the rake away and prepare the shovel. It must snow again, right? It has to. It will. March, that’s when it’ll snow.

But this is the commentary of the weather obsessed, a troop I once belonged to, a long, long time ago. I broke free from those chains, from the chains that held my poor grandmother hostage for so long, in fact, right up to the moment of her death. I no longer live and die on weather, and when I see others proclaiming their misery simply based on the color of the sky I have to wonder why they, too, haven’t yet sought the salvation that comes from skyward ambivalence. I won’t care today that it’s gray and raining, and so I won’t care that March will be lots of that, with a bit of snow, or a lot of snow, who could say?

See, I don’t care about the weather anymore, not one bit. And it has led me to a place where things are much better. Wintery weather is just a reason to own skis. Rain is just a reason to own a house with a sturdy roof. And the summer sun is just a reason I must visit the dermatologist with increasing frequency. See, completely and entirely unconcerned about the weather. That’s why I can look to March not as an ugly month of the in-between, but rather as a month to prepare.   March isn’t spring, but the month sounds like spring, and when spring comes then summer follows. This is how it all works.  March is for preparing.

And what better time to prepare than when the skies are gray and the temperatures not cold enough to snow sport and not warm enough to do anything productive under the sun? There is no better time to prepare, and that’s why those who own lake houses shouldn’t sit around and wait for March to be over. They shouldn’t rest, contented in knowing that summer is still months away. I’m continually amazed by the lack of March motivation amongst the lake set. May, now that’s when they feel the burden of preparedness. But in March they don’t care. Must I remind you that last May we had summer that began as  early as the 20th of that month? How on earth can you enjoy instant and immediate summer if you spent March in the malls and on your couch?

If you’re a lake home owner, March is for getting ready. March is for buying a new grill because we all know your old grill is terrible. And why are you buying a Weber when we all know you can do better? March is for cleaning the gear room, where the life vests and the fishing poles and the paddle boards were hastily crammed last October. March is for doing the things that will make May so much better. But what about for those who don’t yet own lake homes? What about those who sit in the city or lounge in the suburbs, wondering what week long road trip they might take to pretend they enjoyed their summer? Well, March is a forgiving month for those people. March is a month for shopping. March is a month for buying. Yes, you should have been thinking about this last October, but you didn’t, because the Cubs were on their way to the World Series and you are forgiven for being obsessed. But now, this March, you’re running out of time but you still have plenty.

March is for getting ready. March is for looking. March is for contract writing, and then April is for closing.  Then May is for preparing and June is for enjoying your weekends in an entirely different way. If you haven’t even begun your search, that’s fine. Let’s get together this month. Let’s drive around and find something perfect. Let’s do this now because it’s March and there’s really nothing else to do.

Geneva Lakefront Market Update
David Curry

Geneva Lakefront Market Update

I’ve been writing 2017 on my checks with solid consistency for the better part of a month now. There are no more sixes that have been scratched into sevens.  It’s 2017 and we know it, the shock of a new year has worn off.   Spring is racing towards us, or it’s here, or it’s not, no one is sure.  The year isn’t old enough to judge yet, but at seven weeks, the market is ready for a 2017 assessment.

The best way to judge an early year market is not by watching the closing data. Closings in January were sales from November or December. They are hold overs that pay testament to the prior year activity, and so they aren’t important. No matter, there haven’t been any 2017 lakefront closings to discuss. But there have been some new listings to review, and in those new listings there’s a bit of a story. The market can be measured by sales, measured by inventory, but also measured by the market reaction to new inventory. Let’s discuss that.

Last week a new lakefront in Cedar Point came to market in the $1.5MM range. A few days later, that lakefront property had sold. A magnificent sales job by the participating agents? A super rare piece of inventory that throngs of buyers had been anxiously awaiting? Not really, just an entry level lakefront that came to market cheap, and sold quickly.  Every property has a price at which it will sell immediately, so there’s no secret to that particular sauce.   But the sale proves the entry level market still has considerable legs even after the high volume year that was 2016. The quick listing and sale is a good sign for our market.

Two other lakefronts were brought to market this year, one being my listing in the South Shore Club that you’re looking at in the above photo. That’s a great house, but I haven’t sold it yet. It’s only been on market for three weeks, so by now it’s only fair to recognize that I didn’t price it as a fire sale. Another home in the South Shore Club that hasn’t sold for years came back to market as well, leaving two available homes in the club.  Remember, these aren’t association homes priced as lakefronts. They’re $5MM lakefronts priced as $3MM association homes.

Another lakefront in Fontana hit the market at just under $6MM. That’s a nice lakefront home to be sure, and it’s only been on market for the past two weeks or so.  Three new listings in total, one sold immediately, the other two for sale.  No carry over sales from 2016 yet, although there are a couple that will be closing over the coming weeks as there are currently five lakefront homes pending sale (including new contracts on the Solar Lane lakefront and the harbor front home in Country Club Estates).  So where does that leave us? Do we have the makings of a dynamic 2017 or are we seven weeks into a dud? The quick sale in Cedar Point tells us that buyers are ready and willing to pounce, but the two available at the higher ranges suggest buyers are still measured, still cautious, still paying attention. After all, this is the Midwest and we do measured very, very well.

The only thing we know so far is that the market is low on inventory, which is the same thing we knew at the end of December. Without new inventory, there’s no fuel for this fire.  The stock market stability is wonderful for our real estate market, and interest rates remain low, albeit it at higher lows than last year.  And there are buyers, plenty of buyers. All we need now is some more inventory, and I expect the market will find a way to provide that in the coming weeks. If you’re a buyer in search of something you haven’t yet found, let’s talk.

Lake Geneva Lake Access Market Review
David Curry

Lake Geneva Lake Access Market Review

That headline is clunky. But it’s only clunky because it has to be. Lake Geneva is the general term for our market. Unfortunately sometimes it’s too generic, like when people borrow the term to describe a listing near Pell Lake. Lake Geneva Area Home! That sounds better than “It’s Super Close To Pell Lake, Folks”. As for me, I don’t even know where Pell Lake is because I’ve never looked for it. There’s a chance it’s wonderful, but I’m betting against. Anyway, Lake Geneva is the market, it’s the city, and Geneva Lake is the lake. So when I say “Lake Geneva Lake Access” I’m describing the homes within the city limits of the City of Lake Geneva that possess lake access to Geneva Lake. That’s all. Onward.

I heard that the weekend Winterfest festivities were a bit crowded. As in, way too crowded. And this is the problem with Lake Geneva just as it’s a reason that people like it. If you like the scene, no where can it be found so easily. There are restaurants and shops and shops and restaurants, and we used to have like fifty coffee shops and now we only have a couple. Lake Geneva is the epicenter of this market, it’s important and it’s necessary. A fantastic lake and beautiful homes only take you so far, because when it rains or when it’s winter you have to be able to visit a town to buy things to eat and things to wear. Lake Geneva might be everything to our local economy, but in terms of our lake access housing market it actually matters very little.

That’s because for all of the real estate in the city, there aren’t loads of lake access homes. Much of the market functions like a lake access market as that area behind the beach and the library often trades from one vacation home owner to another even though that market (Maple Park) lacks specific lake rights.  In this segment, the homes immediately along Geneva Street, those homes that face the lake, they have been increasingly popular for the vacation home set. The homes lack private lake access but they have that view, and nowhere else can a vacation home owner so easily wake on a Saturday and stroll along the lake into town for breakfast. That’s pretty nice, but sorry Sorta-Lake-Access-Maple-Park-District, you’re not included today.

For 2016, just seven lake access homes within the City of Lake Geneva printed. They ranged in price from $568k to $1.35MM.  The lake access market there consists primarily of Geneva Manor (two sales for 2016). This association on the West side of town is fine, but the off-water homes lack boatslips and nearly all of them lack views, and so you’re buying a home in a neighborhood that affords you a private park and swimming piers, but no slip. It should also be mentioned that you’re buying into a tax-heavy environment, as an offer water home in Geneva Manor that prints in the $800k range will soon receive a tax bill in the $18k range. That’s rough, and while the lakefront market generally absorbs the city taxes much more easily, the lake access market there suffers a bit for it. Then again, most buyers don’t even think about that before they buy, so perhaps it matters very little.

 

Further away from the city but still within the city limits, Geneva Bay Estates. This association had two sales last year, both of rough homes in terrific locations, both possessing a boat slip. These homes sold for $575k and $825k, respectively. Geneva Bay Estates is off of Snake Road, and it’s highly desirable. Low density, low overall house count, and a pleasant lakefront park and pier system make for a high quality lake access association.

On the other side of the city there are several associations that offer its owners private lake access, but they are lesser known because they’re not very large. Maytag Estates and Somerset are the largest here, and one off-water sale did print in Maytag for $1.35MM. That was a decent home with a slip and some views. Somerset had some inventory last year but no MLS sales. To the North, Pine Tree Lane had a sale with a bit of a view and no slip for $545k.  One other home sold, but it was technically a condo on Wrigley Drive. That home sold off-water with a slip for $1.030MM. It was a nice house, but with limited outdoor space, no lakefront park, and a pier shared by three owners.

Today, just two off-water lake access homes are available in the city. Our low inventory theme plays no favorites, as every association and municipality is plagued by a lack of inventory at the moment.  Plenty of buyers want to be near to the city of Lake Geneva, and there are good reasons for that desire, as the scene there is difficult to beat. The convenience of walking into town for a Sunday morning breakfast or a Friday night fish fry is meaningful. But along with that convenience and activity you have to consider the throngs of vacationers that arrive in that city on the weekends. It can, at times, feel like too much. Like at Winterfest, when the bars are full and all you really wanted was a Badger Burger.

Lake Geneva’s Winterfest
David Curry

Lake Geneva’s Winterfest

I admit when it comes to events that I lack enthusiasm when compared to some of my enthusiastic competitors. Chili Cook Off Dinner This Friday Night! I can’t bring myself to care about that. Elkhorn Rotary Club 23rd Annual Pot Luck Dinner This Sunday!  That means nothing to me.  I can’t even feign interest or enthusiasm or concern.  That’s part of what makes this blog somewhat difficult at times. I don’t really want to write about things I don’t care about just for the sake of being an involved member of this community. That’s because the community, as I see it, is different from the way it looks on Facebook, because that’s a particular lens that I don’t own. Not everything is fun, not everything is interesting, and not everything is something you should attend.  SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY MOVIE NIGHT AT SHOWBOAT IS “JUMANJI”!!!!

It’s because of this that I have shied away from telling you about every little goings on in this market. I don’t really tell you about things in the way that I used to, because it seems insincere to me if I tell you to do something that I don’t want to do myself.  Do you care that this Sunday you can go to Pier 290 and watch the Super Bowl? Neither do I, because I can watch that game at home and since I write this to my Illinois clients I’m guessing that very few of you (none) want to stay at Pier 290 until late Sunday night when you likely have to work on Monday morning. So I’m not going to tell you to watch the Super Bowl there, because I don’t really need the content and I’m aware that such an invitation is likely to be ignored anyway. That said, there is something worthwhile this weekend.

Lake Geneva’s Winterfest is this weekend, and it’s important not because of what it is, but because of what it represents. Yes, there will be snow sculpting on display and those displays are worthy of your attention. The competitors are skilled and they slave away to create something that is only valued until it melts, which, according to our forecast, should be sometime around Tuesday of next week. This work is akin to a famous chef making the best of meals, the fanciest of meals, the most expensive of meals, and you’re lucky enough to score an invite to the dinner table. But like a fine meal that won’t hold up well to microwave re-heating, the snow sculptures are best enjoyed fresh, before the dolphin’s nose melts and renders the once vibrant animal a lowly manatee.

The sculptures are one thing, perhaps the main thing, but there’s the ice bar at the Baker House, helicopter rides for those uncertain they care about making it to Monday, and other fun things as well. There’s a scene here, and it matters because the scene plays out during the first week in February. We all know what the scene looks like in July, because it’s a summer scene that has likely been seared, pleasantly, into each of our minds. That scene is so very lovely. But this is a winter scene, and it matters because Lake Geneva isn’t just a place for summer. It’s a place that thrives in all seasons, in the spring and summer and in the fall, yes, but also in the dead of winter. The scene is alive, this town in action, never taking time off, always here, open, ready.

And that’s why it matters. Many resort towns, especially in the Midwest, fail at one season or another. The Northwoods will gladly allow you to be mosquito bitten in the summer and frostbitten in the winter. This is what the Northwoods does.  Door County will sell you ice-cream in the summer and show you their roof-goats with great pleasure. But in the winter Door County is closed, the lights dimmed, the scene on hold until June. Michigan, well, I’m not sure about Michigan in the winter because I visited Harbor Country once in late June and their season hadn’t yet started, so I cannot be certain exactly how terrible that place might be in February. But Lake Geneva is the same in summer as it is in the winter, it’s thriving, it’s bright, and it’s ready for you.

This weekend, come up for a visit. Walk the downtown. Take pictures next to the snow dolphins. Have a drink in an ice bar. And then come over and visit me at N1561 East Lakeside Lane in the South Shore Club. I’ll be holding that new listing open from 1-4 pm on Saturday, and it would be a shame for me to have to sit there all by my lonesome. See you at the lake this weekend,  when the scene will be on full display even while our Midwestern “competitors” hibernate.

 

Photo courtesy Lake Geneva Country Meats
Ski Towns
David Curry

Ski Towns

When you grow up in the Midwest, you are taught certain things. You are taught that the Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers, the Minnesota Vikings or the Detroit Lions are your team. They’re your team through the bad and the good, whether you want them to be or not. If your son comes home one day and tells you that he likes the Seahawks, no matter if their quarterback went to Wisconsin or not, this is a terrible, awful day in the history of your family. You’re taught these things and you’re also taught one other thing that’s less blatant but nonetheless present. The Midwest is not as good as the other places.

The other places can be the coasts or they can be, as they tend to be, the mountains. It doesn’t matter which mountains, because they’re all better. See, in the mountains it snows and then it’s sunny and sometimes it’s sunny and then it snows. It’s not cloudy there. It’s not cold, either. It’s snowy and warm and sunny and still, super snowy. Wisconsin children cannot fathom how it can be all of those things at once, and so the desire to experience it grows. Should we all move to the mountains? It’s better there. This is what we grow up thinking, and then, one by one, the children of Wisconsin grow and leave this place, they leave to be bartenders and lifelong ski rental fitters, but none of that matters because oh, the snow.

This week, I worked in Lake Geneva on Monday and then I hung out at a fancy hotel in a little mountain town on Tuesday. I stayed there with my wife until Thursday, and now I’m back in Lake Geneva, working. The town I visited was less a town and more a resort, a shiny log hotel in a little draw called Bachelor Gulch. It was nice, this place, except when we had to evacuate because the hotel was on fire. It was burning slowly, they assured us. No need to panic. Throw this vintage wool blanket over your shoulders and sip this hot chocolate near this outdoor fire, it’ll be fine. The hotel was nice, the time spent worthwhile, the mountains as tall as I remembered them.

But this isn’t about these mountains. It’s about the parallels drawn from some time in the mountains and the rest of my time here. It’s about Lake Geneva, as it should always be, and it’s about the Chicago families I spoke with who were wearing the same patterned wool blankets and drinking the same ritzy hot chocolate. It’s about the search for something that can interject some excitement into an otherwise pattern plagued existence. That, after all, is why people board planes and fly to that place. For something different. There are no mountains in the Midwest, though I’ll happily substitute the Wisconsin Driftless for the Colorado Rockies, but that’s just me.

Because I’m me, and I’m fascinated by the real estate markets in unique locations, I had to ask about condos and houses and condotels and terrible, awful, embarrassing fractional ownerships. I asked a Realtor, a friendly enough fella who seemed to know what was what. I asked about this hotel and that condominium, about this small mountain town and that small mountain town. I asked about appreciation and decline, about the number of sales here and why such an astounding absence of sales there. I asked the things I know to ask. Because that’s what you do when you go somewhere and like that somewhere- you seek to own some of it.

After some time at that resort we left to ski out of another resort. Then we went to town in another town to shop, then to another place. This place looked like that place, except this place had a Starbucks in a house and not in a strip mall. The other places were similar to the place we started. Then to Breckenridge and Frisco and Edwards and Avon. Eagle and Vail and Copper Mountain. To all of them to look, to explore, to see what they have to offer.  Places to buy ski boots? Check. Places to buy hats and gloves? Check. Places to get a coffee? Check. Places to buy marijuana? Check. Places to buy those communist inspired Colorado logo t-shirts and hats and stickers? Check. A ski hill somewhere looming over it all? Check.

These were just some of the towns we visited, and with that exploration the pattern was revealed. The towns, each unique, sure, but each the same. The mountains all tall, the snow all white, the sky, contrary to what the brochures and my childhood told me, gray and heavy. To be a buyer in one of these towns is to be a buyer in each of these towns. To seek real estate in one is to seek real estate in them all. And I hadn’t driven north or south or particularly far west. I was just on a highway making stops and detours along the way. If I were a Chicago buyer seeking something in this place, how do I choose which place when the places are all the same?

This is the same way I felt when exploring the gulf coast beach towns 20 years ago. If Anna Maria Island was okay, would Longboat be better? Why buy in Longboat when Siesta Key is close? What about Port this or Royal that? And if those are fine, what about Captiva? Sanibel is the same, so there? Fort Meyers seems okay, along the beach anyway, but Naples is so close. Marco is close, too. All of these towns possessing similar things- shops to buy shells and shops to buy t-shirts and sunscreen. The ingredients are all the same, so how to choose which place?  How can I buy in one when another one that I haven’t  yet seen might be better? This was my coastal problem and this was my mountain problem. Vail is nice, sure, but it feels too fake for me. Frisco, now that’s more like a real town, but my wife made us eat Himalayan food there and it wasn’t any good.

The way I feel when I go to these places is likely the way Chicago families feel when they visit this place, Lake Geneva. Why buy in Lake Geneva when Delavan is close? If Delavan is in contention, Lauderdale should be, too. Beulah isn’t far, neither is Mary, and if Mary is being considered then Browns should be, too. After all, each town has some places to buy t-shirts and cheese and you can get summer sausage at the gas stations in every one of these lake towns. This is why buyers here can find themselves confused, and as someone who visits other regions and feels that confusion, I’m here to help clear up any Lake Geneva confusion.

Lake Geneva is better than all of the other lakes. Plain and simple. It’s way, way better. Like a trillion times better. So don’t be confused here. Don’t look around as thought there might be a better lake around the corner. Don’t think you’re going to find something that we haven’t already bested. Lake Geneva wins, so stop your search. Just buy here. And if you think a mountain town is a better option, you’ll be shocked to learn that I don’t disagree. As long as you can jump in the car on a Friday afternoon and drive to that mountain town in 90 minutes, go for it. Otherwise, don’t be silly.