Williams Bay Lake Access Market Review

When a buyer finds his way to Lake Geneva and begins to search for a suitable lake house, he tends to do lots of things wrong. He tends to see Glenwood Springs and think it’s just like Cedar Point Park, or he sees the Loch Vista Club and assumes it’s the same as Sybil Lane. Lake access is lake access, after all, and when you’re just up the road a ways from the lake it doesn’t matter what lane you’re walking. This is a mistake, but you can’t blame our home seeker for his folly. It’s not easy to understand this market, unless you’re just looking for some house on some street, then, by all means, wander away. Or worse yet, stop at an open house and work with that agent who shoved the sign into the snow bank.

The associations that surround this lake operate heavily on nuance, and it’s that nuance that confuses and distracts would-be buyers. Shouldn’t a house in Cedar Point be valued the same as a house in Country Club Estates? These two associations are, after all, the most similar of the large lake access associations, and so it makes sense that a home just up the street from the lake on Shabonna would be worth the same as one just up the street on Glenview.  Our buyer, with his obvious knowledge, wanders up Shabbona and finds a house for sale at $1.5MM, then he wanders up Glenview and finds one for $389k. Things are not adding up.

That’s because of the nuance, of the desirability of one place that might be somehow greater than the other place, even though at first blush the markets look the same. Shabbona homes don’t have boatslips just as Glenview homes lack them. But Shabbona has a harbor adjacent and Big Foot Country Club up the road, and all Glenview has is a beach nearby and Kishwauketoe trails.  That’s why the market behaves differently, because of those things that are not readily noticed. Today, I want to begin a few association specific 2016 market reviews to help better explain these nuanced differences. I won’t spend a day on each association, rather I’m going to dissect these associations into municipality groupings. First up, Williams Bay, because I’m from here and I’m sitting here now and it just seems appropriate to put my town first.

The lake access associatons in Williams Bay proper include only these few: Cedar Point Park, Summer Haven, Oakwood Estates, Loch Vista Club, and Dartmouth Woods. Because Dartmouth Woods is a lakefront association that finds membership in our lakefront segment, we’ll skip that for now. The lake access market, though made up of four associations, is dominated by one: Cedar Point Park. That’s because it’s huge, and it’s interesting, and it has the most diverse price points.  2016 provided sales as low as $142,800 and as high as $775k. The cheap sale was a remnant foreclosure, an REO that was an absolute mess of a house. I looked at it plenty, made an offer on it personally once, and decided that it was a house that was terminally hampered by the layout and overall design. The most expensive sale was on Oak Birch, and I liked that parkway cottage quite a bit. $775k for a cottage without a boatslip sounds like a lot of money, until you realize the setting was immensely special and the views comparable to any off-water view you could find.

In total, 16 homes sold in Cedar Point last year.  Three were over $750k, two of which were on a parkway. The parkways, as I should mention, are large grassy swaths that run from the lake and provide ample community lawn space for the association. If your home is located directly on a parkway, you’re in luck. It’s worth a lot of money, even for a home that doesn’t have a slip.  No homes in Cedar Point Park possess transferable boatlsips, in fact, no association home in any Williams Bay association can offer you a transferable boatslip. Keep that in mind.  Notable in Cedar Point last year was not the number of home sales, rather the low entry price of many of those sales. Nine of the 16 sales closed below $300k, proving that Cedar Point is a budget friendly option for anyone seeking a lake house in an old time association.

Nothing sold in Summer Haven last year, and nothing sold in Oakwood Estates. These two associations flank Pier 290 and Gage Marine, with Summer Haven to the North and Oakwood to the south. Both associations offer nice community piers, a private park, and some sparse parking. Summer Haven has a sand beach, making it one of very few associations on Geneva to lay claim to a sandy patch of frontage.  Of the two, Oakwood Estates is the more valuable, mostly because the lakeside aesthetic is superior and the separation from Gage Marine is greater.

The Loch Vista Club is where I grew up. It’s where I will always feel at home. It’s the pier I learned to swim from, the pier my kids learned to swim from, the place I know better than all of the others.  It’s a quality little association, with two piers and a diving board. There are no transferable slips, and the guy next up on the boatslip waiting list first scribbled his name onto it in the 1970s. If you want a slip, the Loch Vista Club isn’t for you. But if you want an idyllic lake experience, it’s a winner. Typical sales prices range from $300k and up, and in 2016 two off-water homes printed. One for $495k and one for $584k. These two sales are important, as they’re actually quite high for off-water homes possessing no view and no slip.

In total, 18 lake access homes sold in Williams Bay during 2016. Four other vacation homes sold last year with private frontage.  The take away is that if you’re a lake house buying in the Bay, don’t buy a home that doesn’t possess lake rights. That is, those special access rights that afford an owner unique membership to a private lakefront park and pier system.  During the prior market peak buyers would routinely buy off-water homes that lacked lake access and treat them as lake homes. They did this because the lake access prices were so high that the non-access homes seemed cheap in comparison. Today, the lake access homes are still affordable, and if you’re looking to make a solid investment in a lake house you’d do well to consider one of these four associations. The available inventory is sparse, but there is still value available.

Above, my son on the Loch Vista Club diving board at sunset.