Seven of the Ten Lots at the Lake Are One Seller

By Greg Holthaus, Owner & Designated Managing Broker · October 6, 2026

Tuesdays at the Lake of Egypt usually mean houses. This one is about the ground they sit on, and about a number this series has never been able to publish before: what it actually costs to own a lot you have not built on yet.

Our own feed carries 10 parcels of land in Lake of Egypt subdivisions this morning, from $30,000 to $899,900. Ten is the entire list. It is a small market and a thin week, and the honest thing is to say so rather than widen the search until the table looks impressive.

Every parcel in our own feed whose address or subdivision places it in a Lake of Egypt subdivision, read on the morning of October 6, 2026. Shaded rows are the seven Wagon Creek listings. Ten is the whole list, and it is a small number — we are not going to pad it with Marion town lots to make a longer table. Acreage is shown only where the listing publishes it; three of the seven Wagon Creek parcels do not. The tax column is the figure carried on each listing record, which is the current assessment on the parcel as it stands today — not what it will be after a sale or after a house is built on it.

Seven of the Ten Are One Seller

Look down the address column. 7 of the 10 parcels are Wagon Creek listings, every one of them through the same brokerage — REALTY 618 — and 5 of the 7 have been listed for exactly the same 118 days. That is not seven sellers who each decided to sell. That is one release of lots, put on the market together.

Which matters for a buyer in a specific way: you are not negotiating against a neighbour’s asking price, you are negotiating against the rest of the seller’s inventory. The spread inside that one subdivision runs $45,000 to $425,000, a factor of 9.4, and one of them has already come down — the $425,000 parcel was $450,000, a $25,000 reduction.

Three things in that cluster we would want answered before writing an offer, and none of them is in the listing:

• Only 4 of the 7 publish an acreage. The $425,000 parcel is one of the three that does not, so there is no way to work out what you are paying per acre at the top of the range.
• The tax figures do not track the asking prices. Two parcels carry an identical assessment of $1,102 — one asking $95,000 and one asking $425,000. Another two share $190. On placeholder-addressed lots that is a sign the assessments belong to parcels as the county currently has them drawn, not to the lots as they are being sold. Get the parcel number and look it up before you assume the tax line applies to what you are buying.
• Every one of the seven lists its water source as “Other.” More on that below, because it is the whole ballgame on a vacant lot.

What It Costs to Wait — and a Guess We Made Yesterday, Now Measured

Yesterday’s Market Monday found something odd across all four counties: half the houses for sale had cut their asking price and only 18.4% of the land had. We offered a reason — a house costs money every month you own it and a vacant lot mostly does not — and we labelled it plainly as a plausible mechanism we had not measured.

Today we can measure part of it, because every listing record in our feed carries the parcel’s annual property tax.

The 46 parcels are not all building lots: 36 are listed as lots and land, 5 as acreage and 5 as farm ground. That is why the top of the land range reaches $14,642 — that figure belongs to a 125-acre tract, not to a lot you would build a house on. The medians are the number to read here; the ranges are there so you can see what is in the set.

The median lot in this search area is assessed $604 a year. The median house is assessed $3,704. That is 6.1 times as much, and in monthly terms the lot is about $50. 30 of the 46 parcels are under $1,000 a year.

So the guess holds up, as far as a tax bill can carry it. A seller sitting on a lot is paying something like fifty dollars a month to keep saying no. A seller sitting on a house is paying six times that in tax alone — and the tax is only the floor. A house also carries insurance, utilities that cannot be shut off entirely, maintenance that does not pause, and in most cases a mortgage. None of those are in this data and all of them push the real gap wider than 6.1.

What this does NOT explain is which way the causation runs. A low holding cost makes waiting possible; it does not prove that is why any particular seller is waiting. Land also has a thinner buyer pool than a house — it sells only to someone who also wants to build — and that would produce the same pattern on its own. We can say the mechanism is affordable. We cannot say it is the reason.

And You Can See the Waiting in the Numbers

The part worth slowing down on is that the middles are almost identical. A typical lot has been listed 61 days and a typical house 56 — 5 days apart, which is nothing. The whole difference is in the tail. 20 of the 46 lots are past three months against 22 of 81 houses, 4 lots are past a year against 1 house, and the longest-listed lot has been on the market 1,029 days — nearly three years — where the longest-listed house is at 375 days.

That is what a low carrying cost buys you: not a faster sale, but the ability to still be there in year three. The four parcels past a year, with what each is assessed:

Three of these four are Marion parcels inside the wider search area rather than lake lots. The one that is at the lake is 0000 Kokopelli Dr, listed 526 days and reduced $5,100 along the way, and it carries the heaviest tax relative to asking price of any parcel on the lake list — 2.1% of what it is asking, every year. 1921 Grange Hall Rd is one this series has mentioned before — our September 15 edition noted it among the lake’s long-sitting parcels, and it is still unsold at the same asking price with no reduction recorded. We are deliberately not telling you how many more days that is. The day count we quoted in September came from a different source than the one in this table, and the two do not measure the same thing: the figure here counts from a listing that began in May 2025, the September figure counted from a February 2026 start. A day count describes the current listing, not the property’s whole history, and subtracting one source from another would have produced a number that is arithmetically impossible — more elapsed days than there are days between the two posts.

The One Field That Decides Whether You Can Build

A vacant lot is only worth what you can put on it, and the listing field that speaks to that is the water and sewer source. Across all 46 parcels in the search area:

• 25 state public water or sewer at the parcel.
• 9 state plainly that there is none.
• 12 say “Other,” “None” in a way that reads as blank, or nothing at all.

On the ten lake parcels specifically it is worse: 7 of the 10 tell you nothing, including all seven Wagon Creek lots. 2 state utilities and 1 states none.

We are not reading that as a problem with the lots. A placeholder address on an unbuilt parcel often means the record was created before the utility detail existed, and plenty of ground at the lake is served perfectly well. What we are saying is that the listing will not answer it for you. Water, sewer or septic approval, and electric service are three separate questions with three separate answers, and a septic permit at the lake depends on soil and setbacks on that specific parcel. Ask before the earnest money, not after.

Why We Are Not Giving You a Price Per Acre

Because at this lake it is close to meaningless, and this is the third time this series has had to say so. Across the 38 parcels that publish an acreage, the price per acre runs from $7,439 an acre (Tbd Turner Rd, 25.54 acres in Creal Springs) to $882,352 an acre (1614 Peabody St, 0.17 acres in Marion). That is a factor of 118.6.

And the spread is not telling you anything about the lake. It is telling you that a sixth of an acre inside Marion and twenty-five acres outside Creal Springs are different products that happen to share a unit. The same thing happened when we measured the houses here: $133 to $612 a square foot among waterfront homes alone, because buyers are paying for water access and position rather than for area. At a lake, the unit of value is the frontage and the access, and neither one divides neatly by acres or by square feet. Eight of the 46 parcels do not publish an acreage at all, so even the spread is computed on a partial set.

If You Are Buying a Lot Here

The lots are not going anywhere — that is the whole finding above — so the pressure is lower than it would be on a house. Use it:

• Pull the parcel number and look up the real tax before you trust the figure on the listing. On placeholder-addressed lots the assessment may describe a parcel the county has drawn differently from the one you are buying.
• Get the utility answers in writing, separately. Water, sewer or a septic permit, and electric. A lot with no septic approval is a lot you cannot sleep on.
• Price against the seller’s other lots, not against the asking price. Where one party holds seven of the ten, the comparable you want is the one next door in the same release.
• Ask what has already been turned down. A parcel at 526 days with one reduction behind it has had offers, or has had none, and either answer tells you what to write.
• Count the holding cost into your build timeline. At the median $50 a month it is small, but if your build is three years out it is still a number — and a lot is assessed as vacant ground today, which is not what it will be assessed as once something is standing on it.

💰 Buying a Lot Is Not Buying a House, and the Loan Is Not the Same Either

A vacant lot does not finance the way a home does, and the terms a bank will offer on ground are a different conversation from the one you have had about a mortgage. If the plan is to buy now and build later, that is two financings and they interact. Ask before you write an offer, not after. Free, no-pressure conversation with Jarod Sanders, SIRE’s in-house lender.Jarod Sanders · CrossCountry Mortgage · NMLS #2337228. Not a loan offer, a rate quote, a commitment to lend, or a guarantee of eligibility.

Talk to Jarod →

Who is Greg Holthaus?

Greg Holthaus is the Owner and Designated Managing Broker of Southern Illinois Realty Experts, with 25+ years in Southern Illinois real estate and more than 10,000 transactions closed. He leads a full-service operation — home sales, mortgage, title, and property management under one roof — with offices in Marion, Herrin, and Carbondale. Meet Greg ›

About the numbers: Every figure here comes from our own four-county listing feed, read on the morning of October 6, 2026. The search is three address-radius queries centred on Lake of Egypt addresses, which returned 153 active listings in total — 82 houses, 46 parcels of land and the balance commercial and other. The ten-parcel lake list is narrower than that search: it is the parcels whose address or recorded subdivision places them in a Lake of Egypt subdivision. The wider 46-parcel figures — the tax medians, the days-on-market comparison and the price-per-acre spread — cover the whole search area, which reaches into Marion and Creal Springs and includes town lots that are near the lake rather than on it. We have labelled which set each number comes from and have not described the wider set as lake land. Tax figures are the annual amount recorded on each listing — the current assessment on the parcel as the county has it drawn today. It is not a forecast, it will change if the parcel is split or built on, and on placeholder-addressed lots it may not describe the lot being sold. Verify any of these by parcel number before relying on it. Tax is the only holding cost in this data. A house also carries insurance, utilities, maintenance and usually a mortgage, none of which are measured here, so the real gap between holding a lot and holding a house is wider than the 6.1 times shown. 6 of the 82 houses in the search area publish no tax figure and are excluded from the house tax row only; they are included in the days-on-market comparison. One house publishes no day count and is excluded from that row. Acreage is published on 38 of the 46 parcels, so the price-per-acre range is computed on a partial set and no per-acre figure is given for any parcel that does not publish one. Days on market measures the current listing, not the property’s whole history; a parcel relisted after a break shows the newer count. A price-change record shows only the most recent change, so reductions are understated rather than overstated. The suggestion that low holding costs let land sellers wait is consistent with these figures but is not established by them — a thinner buyer pool for land would produce the same pattern, and this data cannot separate the two. Nothing here is a legal opinion on buildability. Water, sewer, septic approval, setbacks and electric service are determined parcel by parcel by the relevant authority, not by a listing record or by us. Asking prices are not sale prices. Nothing here is an appraisal, a loan offer, a rate quote, or a commitment to lend. Southern Illinois Realty Experts is an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage.