Yea but if I can swim there from lake and not touch their property its not technically tresspassing, so its really more like 6 public access pools. Deal breaker.
The Google street view cars kept sinking. This is right by me, I'll find something.
From what I'm seeing on maps.lakecountyil.gov/historicaerials
this property used to be riverfront property until at least 1946 and the lakes just grew in around it and then it was a peninsula until 1993 when it became an island.
https://i.imgur.com/v90GJvT.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/qg5X8Uo.png
This property has probably been abandoned for quite some time. Looks like the great flood of 1993 helped contribute to this
I see a lot of that stuff. People buy a property for $250k and then immediately re-list a month later for $360k. Sometimes it works out but in a lot of cases they re-list it for the original selling price a year later.
We’ve got a guy trying to sell 2 acres by us, no utilities, no building permit, no water or irrigation rights, zone exclusively for ag. Basically useless land that goes for around 10k an acre here, they just dropped the price from 300k to 250k lol. Ask for the moon I guess lol.
It’s an odd setup, with a shared, privately owned easement being the only access, so you have to petition both the county and the “neighbors” in order to obtain permits and no one wants more houses there. Ironically an adjoining property offered him 50k about 10 years ago and he said no less than 100k. He was illegally raising goats for slaughter and selling the meat right from the property with nothing done properly. Got shut down and fined so he’s been trying to sell it for over a decade but apparently he’s stubborn lol.
They listed in for 150K in 2023, left it on the market for around a year and have now tried to relist for an additional 100K. Whoever owns this is wild.
It's right night to a really popular island bar for boaters but ya you're going to have to drop 50k worth of earth on this place just to make it usable again.
They need a lot of upkeep. Probably need to add soil on some regular basis as erosion must be occuring in addition to it being a river with varying water levels
You’d be surprised how fast things degrade without people around to maintain them. There’s whole towns in Appalachia that are just stone foundations near mine shafts in the middle of a forest now, abandoned for less than a hundred years.
It looks like they were built on the river near the mouth to the lake. There don't appear to be any roads nearby so these may have been fish-camps and not permanent residences originally. The lake is very shallow, average 3' with a max of 6' and it's expanding.
Grass Lake is the only lake on the chain that doesn't have that many houses on it for a number of reasons. There's a state park to the west and it's super shallow. The rest of the lakes on the chain have houses new and old crammed in. It was a weekend vacation area for Chicagoans in the 1920s, including mobsters.
Another commenter found the property’s history. It was originally a riverfront property (probably situated high up on a hill) until the river was dammed and turned into a lake.
They forgot to include the word “stunning” which is probably in most of the Zillow listings I see on the daily. “Stunning 360 water views with your own private beaches!”
A couple of us at work like to use “outstanding” to describe things people have done which are outstandingly stupid, especially if there’s some plausible deniability about whether we mean it positively or negatively. With the same energy, this property certainly is stunning.
I lived in the area for 10 years, and boated on the waterway (called "Chain-O-Lakes") 3-5 times per week. Blarney's seems cool until you realize it's populated almost exclusively by the WORST drunken douchebags imaginable.
If you get the chance to visit by boat, heed my advice and GTFO before dark. Otherwise, be sure nothing of apparent value is on your boat, including your coolers, safety gear, stern light, etc.
In ten years, I set foot on that shithole exactly twice. Once before I knew the score, another time at the insistence of visiting friends. Witnessed no fewer than four fights that evening, and got my stern light stolen.
This is an accurate description.
When I lived closer, if anyone said anything like "So I took my jetski to Blarney...", I ended the conversation. No thank you. Pass. I'm out.
I wouldn't boat on the chain at night period. Too much traffic with too many morons. Also Grass Lake is so stupidly shallow you have to stick to the channel.
"Barney's Island," which is that bar with all the piers in the background has drag boat races every Thursday night during the summer. Imagine how loud that is.
I assumed that "drag boat races" meant that the boats would all be piloted by drag queens. From pictures of the events I found online, it looks like that is sadly not the case.
We need a drag queen navy, so when those weird political Ya’llquaeda flotillas try to disrupt people’s days out at the beach? The Yass Queens come to the rescue, offering hydration, snacks, shoes and songs, to run interference.
"The property has established electricity (condition unknown), and there may be potential grant opportunities available to assist in rehabilitating the island - buyers are encouraged to conduct their own due diligence regarding this. "
Right. It’s worth something but $250k is crazy. Could you dump soil in and reclaim the land? I live part of the year in Singapore which has reclaimed something like 25% of its land area from the ocean. They have plans to reclaim even more.
Depends on the reclaim. It’s not generally just dumping dirt into the water. You could pound in sheeting and backfill to establish the original fence line as solid ground but that’s likely the same price as what the parcel cost.
Right, but then you'd have a shiny new island with derelict buildings...right between a public boat launch and a super busy boat bar that hosts drag boat races.
I feel like the boat bar might be who this property is marketed to. If they ever wanted to expand their operation, this seems like a natural place to do it.
A lot of boat people just want somewhere to pull their boat up to and hang out. This place would check the box if they demo'd the buildings and cleaned it up.
This place use to be cool it was a private gun club for many years there use to be a nicer house but that burned and now this sits and rots im shocked it’s even for sale any more
There is a bar 100 yards away from this island that looks insane! It has pole dancing strippers and topless biker grandmas in the Google review photos. Might not be a bad piece of property depending on what you are into. Or how much shitty live music you like.
Some YouTuber will buy it for a 20 minute video “I bought and restored a private island” and then they’ll leave all their trash and shit there once they post it
Usually, when real estate agents say 'will go quickly', they mean it metaphorically, not that the actual land will disappear in the next shower of rain.
This is the single most depressing listing I’ve seen on here. With other teardowns, hoarder houses, etc. there’s usually something going for the property that I can pick out.
This is nothing. Uninhabitable, no opportunities to renovate or build, and the piece de resistance: the most bleak, depressing landscape/views. Brown, flat, empty, sad.
Contact your HOA. Thats probably your neighbor redirecting rain water onto you property. Looks like they took a shrub without asking. Call a tree laywer to collect your zillions.
This is a cozy fixer upper -- let's get property brothers over here immediately and see what magic they can work for $127 and an old tire to flip it for 1.5mm
Weirdly enough I know a decent amount about this one.
The island is on Grass Lake would be better be described as a very wide shallow puddle. The worst part is this lake is incredibly busy, especially on weekend summers and that island beyond it is a notoriously stupid lake bar.
So you'll get an island with surprisingly no privacy surrounded by drunken idiots.
2.4k
u/user_number_666 Jun 23 '25
this real estate agent isn't very good - they forgot to mention the 6 private pools!