The Daniels home’s buyers, who are not yet identified in public records, "loved the privacy of a very wooded lot with direct access to the beach and the panoramic view," said Mara Walsh, one of two agents representing them. Walsh, who represented the property with Peggy Sayre, a fellow agent at the Dawn McKenna Group of Coldwell Banker, declined to discuss the buyers or whether they are from the Chicago area.
Also appealing, Walsh said, was the cabana built midway down the dune between the house and the beach (seen in the photo at the top of this story) and the expanse of glass across the lake-facing northwest side of the house. The latter, she said, "really connects the indoors with the view outside."
Marquette Drive, a slender neighborhood between Lake Michigan and the Galien River, is "a very serene area," Walsh said, but it’s also about a 10- or 15-minute walk to the restaurants and shops along Whittaker Street in downtown New Buffalo.
The property went under contract to buyers after just six days on the market and sold for its full price, which suggests there were multiple offers. But Walsh, as agent for the buyers, was not authorized to say.
Chicago’s two big second-home locales, southwest Michigan and Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, have both been in high demand at the multimillion-dollar level in the past several months, as has the first-home market on the North Shore lakefront. The two second-home markets generally slow down for winter, but Walsh said this may not be a typical winter. "We know the demand is there," she said. She and Sayre "keep getting calls asking, ‘what do you have, what’s for sale,’" she said. "It all depends on whether sellers decide to do it in the winter or wait until spring."
For 32 years, from 1975 to 2007, Lee Daniels was in the Illinois House of Representatives representing two DuPage County districts, initially the 40th, and the 46th from the time of its creation in 1983. He was the House minority leader from 1983 to 2003, except for the years 1995 to 1997, when he was speaker of the House. In 2001, Daniels was the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party.
Prior to his legislative career, Daniels worked in the office of the Illinois attorney general. He left the House in 2007 after declining to run in the 2006 election and turned to practicing law, running a west suburban commercial real estate brokerage and lobbying, among other efforts.
It’s not clear from Berrien County records when Daniels and his wife purchased the New Buffalo property or for what price, but their names appear on the records from 2015 onward. They own the property in a trust in Lee Daniels’s name. It’s likely they had the property for at least a few years before that, while building the house.
