It’s a jolly good time for real estate in these spots

Holiday reminders everywhere in Santa Claus, Ind., and Frankenmuth, Mich.

Nancy Schwab loves Christmas. Really, really loves Christmas.

“I have Santa collections from when I was little,” said Schwab, 62, a retired school administrator. Thus, it became a source of annual annoyance that decking the house with boughs of holly (and twinkly lights) was frowned upon in her Joliet, Illinois, neighborhood until Thanksgiving had come and gone.

Almost two years ago, Schwab and her husband, Robert, a retired carpenter and contractor, began to contemplate relocating to a place with a vastly different feel.

“We started researching, and Santa Claus, Indiana, came up,” Schwab said of the town in the southern part of the state that bills itself as “America’s Christmas Hometown.”

There’s plenty to back up the boosterism: Yule-themed businesses like Santa’s Toys, Santa’s Candy Castle, Santa Claus Haus, the Santa Claus Museum & Village and street names like Silver Bell Circle, Mistletoe Drive, Donder Lane and the main stem, Christmas Boulevard. Statues of St. Nick stand sentry at, among other spots, the post office, the town hall, Santa’s Lodge, a local hotel and the Key Associates Signature Realty agency.

In October of 2020, the Schwabs headed to Santa Claus on a reconnaissance vacation, fell in love with what they saw and signed a contract to build their retirement home on a half-acre corner lot in Christmas Lake Village, a gated community that is home to three lakes — Holly, Noel and Christmas — and home to 90% of the burg’s 3,000 residents.

This past June, the couple moved into a custom-designed three-bedroom ranch house.

“We looked at other towns near here that had equal value in terms of real estate, but they didn’t have that extra Santa thing. That was the deciding factor,” Schwab said.

Partly because of the pandemic, partly because of the small-town appeal and partly because of — well, let’s call it ho-ho-hocation, ho-ho-ho-cation, ho-ho-ho-cation — Santa Claus, Indiana, and the similarly Santa-centric Frankenmuth, Michigan, are enjoying a vogue.

“We have a lot of people moving to Santa Claus from California, Illinois and Minnesota,” said Lisa Gengelbach, a broker at Key Associates.

“A lot of them are retiring here, but there are families coming too. We have great schools,” she said.

Since the start of the pandemic, Frankenmuth, population: 5,000, has had a similar influx of new residents.

“Either they had family ties here or they’d heard good things about it, and because of COVID, they could work from home,” said Andrew Keller, an owner of JMW Real Estate, which has done more than $15 million in business in Frankenmuth this year, nearly a 50% jump over 2019.

The local landscape, about 3 square miles, includes Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland, which styles itself as the world’s largest Christmas store; canopies of lights on Main Street; and, from downtown to the north end of the city, 158 light-wrapped trees.