Thus Far and No Further

Considering that just getting out of the cities—in rush hour or even non-rush hour traffic—and getting to your second home can take the better part of a day, vacationers are looking for property that doesn’t require a grueling car trip. Northwest Wisconsin towns within three hours of the Twin Cities, such as Hayward, Cable, Spooner, Web Lake, and Sirenhave seen increased vacation-home development.

There’s also an increasing amount of development in areas not usually associated with resorts and vacations, that cater to the crowd that just doesn’t want to drive for hours. Legacy Land Group, LLC, a development company in Shell Lake, Wisconsin, has started Majestic Woods, a large development on a lake near part of the development.

Legacy Land’s and Naterra Land’s customers tend to be the kind who are attracted to the idea of a vacation property that they can passon, relatively unspoiled, to their children and their children’s children. Phil Taylor bought his first lot of land, near Duluth, at the age of fifteen, with money saved from a paper route. The Swans recall that their grandparents came to Wisconsin in 1880, and the family still owns the first house in Washburn County to have indoor plumbing.

“We grew up with a cabin to go to,” David Swan says. “The greatest memories are of my family and friends on the lake. Every piece of lakeshore property was developed at one time—it might have been in 1950 by Farmer Smith who had no idea what he was doing and chopped it up into 50-foot lots. Theoretically, it’s all going to get developed, so we want to be a part of it and do it the right way.”


Who is Buying?

Although pre-retirees continue to be a strong market, there are a significant number of young people buying vacation properties. “We see younger buyers looking at second homes,” Bill Grunewald of UpNorth Properties says. “I think many can afford to buy and realize that they can have a great investment and enjoy using it at the same time.”

Legacy Land owners Dave and Kevin Swan say that well over half the buyers of their recent developments are younger people or people with young families, and suggest that it may be a question of not wanting to share the old family cabin with siblings and their children. Mark Ronnei of GrandView Vacation Properties refers to a demographic between 28 and 45 called “The entitlement generation: a generation of people who say ‘I’m not going to wait until I am 50 or 60 to get a little something of what I want, and I want a place up north.’”

Lest the idea of entitlement raise any hackles, Ronnei adds,“It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe in some ways it’s smarter than the rest of us. [Ronnei is fifty]. There are a lot of people who delayed their gratification, got everything done, and was that really the wisest thing to do? We could have been participating in life a little more vigorously all along.”

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