I’ve dreamed of owning a place on the lake all my life. Just like my mom and dad had when I was a young teenager. Lake Claiborne was a 70 minute drive away and several friends in our hometown owned property. My parents bought a empty lot and they bought a a new, discounted 2 bedroom trailer (hail damaged) and had it setup. Drilled a well and had a septic tank installed. We were on a backwater off the main lake. Too shallow for those annoying ski boats. Very quiet and our Jon boat could reach the main lake in about 15 minutes. Three wonderful summers and then the fucking Corps changed the dam settings. :smack: We were landlocked four years. Ever try selling lake property without the lake? Eventually the Corps changed the dam settings again and the water returned. Dad sold the property and that ended it. That property is probably worth triple the value today. (if theres water)
Back then it was still a middle class thing. It was a bit of a stretch but obtainable. But even 35 years ago the prime locations on the main lake were for the rich. Idiots putting 2000 sq foot homes for a weekend lake house. Most didn’t fish. Instead they roared around in those loud ass ski boats and jet skis. Throwing up huge waves and endangering anyone in smaller Jon boats.
Whats it like now? Has the middle class been totally priced out of lake property? You can’t spend more money on a weekend lake house than your real home. I couldn’t justify more than 40k max.
Is lake property just a pipe dream or is it still affordable? Should I even bother calling a Realtor?
‘Good’ lake property is pretty much unobtainable. Nice lakes a reasonable distance from large centers have been priced out of the reach of most people.
That said, you can still get lakefront property on lakes that are more remote or are challenged in other ways.
So, if you are really motivated to find a lakefront property, be prepared to spend hours getting to it.
My grandparents and then my parents have owned cabins for as long as I can remember. My grandparents bought a chunk of lakefront 3 hours away in the early 60’s, built a comfortable cabin with 3 bedrooms, washroom, large kitchen. It had electricity, but no running water. They sold it in 1977 when the drive up there got to be too much for them. My parents bought a cabin the following year approximately 50 miles away from home. It’s still our second home. It has two bedrooms, running water, heat - it’s basically a year round home on a lake.
Both my grandparent and my parents were solidly middle class. I remember when mom and dad went cabin hunting - the one we have is not the one my mom really wanted. That one was quite a bit more expensive. They ended up settling - the lake we’re on is not the best - muddy beach (okay, mucky beach), pretty weedy, we sit high on a hill. Good fishing, but swimming sucks. I have no idea what they paid for it in 1978, but I do know mom was offered $150K last year by a developer who wanted to buy our little cabin and the cabin next door to raze them and build a McMansion.
The property values where we’re at have fluxuated wildly. Six years ago, Mom wouldn’t have been able to sell the cabin for anything - no one was buying. At one point there were at least 5 cabins on our stretch that had been on the market for well over a year. It’s changed drastically over the past two years.
I can say comfortably that around here, 40K may buy you lakefront property at least two hours outside of the Twin Cities, but there will not be a house on that land. Not even an old trailer house.
This is pretty much it. You can get lakefrot property in the midwest for a fairly good price if you’re willing to look way out in the sticks. But if you’re the kind of person who wants a cabin on a lake that might not be a real big drawback for you. A freind has a cabin 4 1/2 hours away but when he takes the kids they usually spend 2 weeks and bring tons of supplies so it’s not a big deal and they love it.
My wife and I have talked about getting a low budget house in Conway. Lake Conway is a 15 min drive away. That’s still over an hour drive from my home.
The downside would be not having breakfasts with a lake view. Sitting outside in the evening listening to the bullfrogs and crickets. The lake experience would be limited to the public boat landing and time on the lake.
Also, crime at the low income property. People would notice quickly that the house was unoccupied weekdays.
We’ve been renting cabins at the state parks for years. Some are right on lakes and waterways. We try to go at least three times in the winter. There’s less people and the cabins have fireplaces. Great get away time for us. Twice in the summer. Reservations are harder to get in the summer.
The lake houses around here are all pricy for the area, but I think they tend to be occupied year-round so I wouldn’t assume that only fantastically rich people live in them. It’s not so far out in the sticks that people can’t just live there permanently, or such an awesome lake that people are coming from far away to spend weekends there.
I definitely think that in the midwest, you could still obtain a modest lakefront property, especially if you don’t mind living in a trailer or driving several hours to reach the closest major city. I have a middle class relative who has a lakefront home about 4 hours north of Detroit. It’s beautiful up there, although definitely very remote and isolated.
I got my lake property the old fashioned way. I inherited it.
When my great grand-uncles bought it over 150 years ago, they just wanted access to the lake for their fishery, and the 120+ acres inland for farming. But they were forced to buy over 2000 feet of “worthless” beachfront in order to get that.
I could never afford to buy my property at even today’s real estate prices. Not with being out in the boonies but only 45 minutes from a Major League Baseball team and an hour from an NFL team.
I wonder what lakefront property costs around Clear Lake, Ca. — I would expect it to be phenomenally expensive, since it’s a beautiful lake and within reasonable driving distance of S. F. Bay Area.
Yet, driving around the lake, I saw a lot of properties near the water (that is, within a block or two), that seemed shabby. Lots of beat-up run-down small cabins, shabby trailers, and the like.
I don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe after buying the land, that’s all you could afford to put on it. But outside of Lakeport (the one non-trivial city on the lake) and outside of several resorts, that what a lot of land around there seemed to look like.
My parents ended up buying a lake house on Lake of the Ozarks (MO), a seven hour drive from their house that’s an hour from me. They’re retired, so they go for weeks at a time. It’s interesting where they are, it’s an inlet so very quiet and the docks are pretty close to each other across the way, all along the path to the main lake. Takes about 5 minutes to get there if you’re being careful with your wake. They have to raise the boats in winter to dry mount them next to the dock, as the lake levels get lowered for winter and if they don’t do that, their boats will just sit on silt.
IIRC, they paid about $80k for it, three bedrooms, two baths, heat, a/c, huge deck across the whole front of the house with big windows. Seemed pretty cheap to me, but I live at Chicago prices. Their “neighborhood” is quite mixed, with about half of the homes being trailers with decking built around them and the full compliment of plumbing and electricity. They are also a tight little neighborhood, a couple neighbors have keys, and they all look out for each other. They have no fear leaving the house empty a couple months at a time.
With all the foreclosure stuff going on, I bet if you took a close look around, you might find a few properties that are affordable. My folks just bought a foreclosed lot that’s one over from theirs, they had to have a scrap company come in and take away the trashed trailer and stuff, cap the plumbing and whatnot, and they will be building a work/storage shed there, since the house has no garage or basement to speak of. They got the lot for next to nothing, and if someone were inclined to put another trailer/deck setup there (or build something more like a cabin) it would be well under $40k.
What do you consider affordable? I suppose we should start there.
Around me, here in South Carolina, there are many developed lakefront properties available, in a wide range of prices. The typical prices I’ve seen recently are from about $150,000 to $400,000 depending on the lot size and the improvements. My personal home is appraised at around the $225,000 level now.
It’s worth noting that, adjusted for inflation, those lakefront properties may not have been as cheap as they seem in retrospect. It’s important to remember that property is real estate–a form of savings. Lake houses are not a vacation expense: they are an investment with a nice side effect. I’ve heard it seriously suggested that people take a windfall, use it as a large down payment for a lake house, and then plan to have the house paid off when the kids graduate high school: then you sell the lake house and send them to college with the proceeds. This gives you 20 years of really nice utility while earning value, and then when the kids are grown you kinda don’t need it anymore anyway.
A kid might assume that the point of the family lakehouse was “Weee! Fun vacation!”. But that doesn’t mean the parents didn’t think of it as a meaningful asset first and a vacation spot second.
ETA: this way of thinking might also be why people put crappy little houses on nice lakes: any profit comes from the land earning value, and maintaining a decent house is expensive and cuts into that.
Not just lakefront, but probably all waterfront property is out of sight now. I bought a half acre waterfront lot (no-bank) on an island in the Washington San Juans in 1969 for $10,500. This was for 125 feet along the water. Three years ago the lot next to mine, almost identical, sold for $350,000. This is not untypical. The problem is, no waterfront property is being made any more.
Another thing - the price noted in the above post is rather cheap for waterfront now. The island in question is quite isolated, with access only via light plane or boat. And the nearest boat ramp is eight miles away. This undoubtedly kept the price down.
(if theres water)
Most didn’t fish. Instead they roared around in those loud ass ski boats and jet skis. Throwing up huge waves and endangering anyone in smaller Jon boats.
Twice in the summer. Reservations are harder to get in the summer.
