A coveted waterfront property on Lake Geneva quietly sold for $20 million last week, making it the area’s priciest home sale this year to date and among the largest on record.
The roughly 10,800-square-foot home at W3806 Lackey Lane sold for about $1,852 per square foot, according to Jack Baker of Coldwell Banker, who represented the buyer.
Dealmaking for the rolling 5-acre estate underscores buyers’ difficulties in trying to score a home on Lake Geneva today amid a dearth of sellers. The property offers 500 feet of level frontage on the lake’s quieter south side and like the majority of lakefront homes, it was never listed publicly, yet drew five buyers ready to make offers, its listing agent Sal Dimiceli Sr. of Lake Geneva Area Realty said.
Selling luxury lakefront properties in Lake Geneva today is almost all word-of-mouth between agents and about 70 percent of deals are never formally listed, Geneva Lakefront Realty’s David Curry said.
“There’s over 600 agents in Walworth County. Out of the 600, probably the top 25 actually network together and sell the majority of the properties, especially the lakefronts,” said Dimiceli.
This often leads to bidding wars between luxury buyers, some of whom have been waiting years for an opportunity to buy their dream summer home in the Wisconsin getaway long popular with Chicagoland’s wealthy elite. Coldwell Banker broker Dan Hodgman recalled one buyer from Naperville telling him, “I have $5 million burning a hole in my pocket, why can’t you find me a home?”
Dimiceli and his seller on Lackey Lane wanted to avoid a bidding war. The seller, William McEssy, brought on Jeff Visner, who worked on the The Geneva Inn, to build the home and wanted to find a buyer who would love it as much as he did, Dimiceli said.
That ultimately meant turning down two bigger offers from other buyers, including an offer that was $5 million, or 25 percent, higher made by someone who wanted to tear down the house, Dimiceli said.
“We didn’t do it for the price,” he said. “We wanted someone who would fall in love with this home.”
Taking the higher price would have made the sale Lake Geneva’s second-priciest of all time, but the $20 million closing ranks as the area’s third most expensive ever. The fourth-priciest, a $17 million sale in 2022 of a property known as Villa Hortensia, was for a home that the buyer, Chicago-area businessman James Conlon, has since torn down. Villa Hortensia sat next to the property that ranks as Wisconsin’s priciest home after its $36 million sale in 2022 of a 14,145-square-foot mansion to Chicago billionaire J. Christopher Reyes.
The second-priciest Lake Geneva home sale closed last year for the estate known as the Aloha Lodge at just under $22 million. Baker declined to identify McEssy’s buyer and records of the sale haven’t yet been made public through Walworth County channels.
Inventory along Lake Geneva’s shore has dropped so low — and confidence in the resale market has risen so high — that luxury buyers are paying top-dollar to tear down homes that typically wouldn’t be viewed as good candidates for demolition in order to build their ideal homes, Curry said. This trend has also played out on Chicagoland’s North Shore along Lake Michigan.
Insatiable demand has led to an increase in prices on Lake Geneva over time, evidenced by Hodgman’s own lakeshore property which he paid about $525,000 for back in 1996 and sold last year for $4.5 million, he said.
Other frustrated buyers have turned to high-end neighborhoods just off the lake, leading to a spike in the value of deeded boat slips that are bought and sold with homes in certain homeowners associations, Hodgman said.
Homes in the Country Club Estates neighborhood, a popular destination for buyers that go this route, have jumped in value from around $300,000 for a two- to three-bedroom cottage to $500,000 since the pandemic, which he attributed, in part, to challenges with buying on the lakefront. He said he has also watched the price of a boat slip at the Abbey Harbor quadruple.
One rare exception to the lack of undeveloped land on the lakeshore is a new listing at 630 South Lake Shore Drive, where the subdivision of the historic Oak Lodge property has left a vacant 2.24-acre lot with 123 feet of frontage available for sale at just under $6.8 million.
Demolitions are so common and vacant lots so rare, that its listing agent, Wendy Murphy, looked to properties considered teardowns to use as comparables when pricing the lot, which sits on the east side of the lake near the downtown area, she said.
“There’s no rules anymore with the teardowns,” Murphy, a broker with Mahler Sotheby’s International Realty, said. “I’ve seen some amazing homes get taken down, but to have a true vacant lot on Geneva Lake is extremely rare.”
While unsatisfied demand brings hearty competition, it’s not always a sign of a healthy market. The average number of home sales on the lake has markedly decreased in the past two years, going from about 12 to 18 sales annually to about half that, said Baker, the buyer’s agent on the $20 million Lackey Lane deal.
Beyond the submarket of lakefront properties, “the second-home market isn’t as seller-friendly as it has been over the last few years,” Murphy said. “We’re seeing the higher end being very stable. But in some of the other markets where financing is needed, we’re definitely seeing a lull of sorts.”
Buyers in the $1 million to $2 million range are “pausing a bit,” making sure properties check all their boxes rather than jumping on homes just because they may lose them if they wait, she said.
From 2020 to 2022, low interest rates, a thriving stock market and flexible work-from-home policies gave a huge boost to homebuyers and prompted those looking to move away from city centers or otherwise find a place to get away. Now, interest rates on a 30-year mortgage are still hovering in the high sixes, the stock market isn’t going up at the same pace it was a few years ago and many companies are requiring employees to return to the office, Curry said.
“Lake Geneva 2025 has all of those potential negative conditions in play, but it also has no inventory,” he said. “Which means when I do get some inventory, I get to sell it because we have a considerable amount of demand that is not satiated by what’s available.”