04/30/07

Sale of the Week - Kenilworth

List price: $975,000
Sale price: $940,000

The Property: This classic red-brick colonial with three bedrooms, two-plus bathrooms, and two fireplaces provided a rare opportunity to get an appealing, nicely updated home in exclusive Kenilworth for under $1 million-and it has played that role twice in the past year. Built in 1929,...

Posted at 06:11 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/26/07

New on the Market - Glencoe Gatehouse

List price: $1.399 million

The Property: Designed by the great North Shore architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, this home was built in 1913 as one half of a pair of twin gatehouses for a lavish lakefront estate on Sheridan Road. When the present sellers, Tierney Danehy and Tom McNulty, bought the place in 1995, it had been severed from...

Posted at 09:07 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/25/07

Housing Bulletin - They Might Be Giants

Last week, two real-estate projects in the Chicago tradition of "make no little plans" took some giant steps forward, as both plans won approval from the city's Plan Commission. One is the ongoing proposal to build a twisting 150-story condo tower-the architect Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire-just north of the Chicago River and west of Lake Shore Drive. Plans for the tower are in their fourth incarnation since the original developer, Christopher Carley, unveiled a rendering of the building in July 2005. (Garrett Kelleher's Dublin-based Shelbourne Development is now handling the project.) A subsequent redesign made the building look like a stumpy version of the architect's initial curvaceous beauty, but the latest version brought some sexiness back to the design. On April 19th, the...

Posted at 09:55 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/23/07

Sale of the Week - Lindenhurst

List price: $224,900
Sale price: $220,000

The Property: On April 11th-the day before this five-room house sold for $220,000-the National Association of Realtors (NAR) forecast that the national median price for an existing home in 2007 will be $220,300. If that prediction holds up, it means that half the...

Posted at 06:16 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/19/07

New on the Market - Gold Coast, Chicago

Update: The property has been taken off the market; the Trafelets are negotiating a private sale.

List price: $649,000

The Property: A duplex in a classic 1920s Gold Coast building designed by Andrew Rebori, this five-room, two-bedroom apartment manages to create elegance in an...

Posted at 07:12 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/18/07

Housing Bulletin - Real-Estate Agent Parking Permits

For people whose job demands that they park all over the city, there may be nothing more frustrating than hunting for a parking space in a permit-zoned Chicago neighborhood. A potential solution to that problem isn't working-most likely because of tinkering by city hall.

Permit-zone parking started on the Northwest Side in 1979 in the neighborhood around Northeastern Illinois University, an innovative way to stop students from swiping all the on-street parking from local residents. Permit zones have since proliferated, and now Chicago has at least 1,300 different zones.

For more than a decade, real-estate agents working in the city have complained that they can't park near the houses that their clients want to see-so over the past year the Chicago Association of...

Posted at 06:47 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/16/07

Sale of the Week - Oak Lawn

List price: $569,000
Sale price: $569,000

The Property: This newly built 11-room, five-bedroom house set the sales record for Oak Lawn when it was sold on April 6th. It is on the same street as-and within two blocks of-this southwest suburb's two previous top sales. The developer Timothy Desmond of Leeside Builders built all three of those...

Posted at 06:21 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/12/07

New on the Market - Beverly, Chicago

List price: $1.4 million

The Property: Designed in the late 1920s by Scipione Del Campo for John Tiberi (the owner of a cement company), this 12-room brick house on the city's Far Southwest Side resembles Tiberi's boyhood home in Italy. While its blond good looks would stand out in any neighborhood, the house literally rises above its neighbors because its...

Posted at 07:15 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (3)

04/11/07

Housing Bulletin - Rising Inventory Favors Buyers

There are far more homes on the market locally than there were at this time last year. As of April 1st, there were 43.3 percent more properties listed for sale in Chicago and the six-county metro area than on the same date a year ago, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLS). What's more, ZipRealty, a California-based sales firm with a sizable Chicago presence, determined last week that Chicago's inventory of homes for sale jumped by 7.5 percent from February to March-exceeding the 6.5 percent average for 18 major metropolitan areas surveyed by the company. It's also a much bigger jump than the norm reported last week by the Wall Street Journal. The paper cited Credit Suisse Group's finding that, since 1985, the average February-to-March...

Posted at 05:00 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/09/07

Sale of the Week - Gold Coast gem

Neighborhood: Gold Coast, Chicago
List price: $12 million
Sale price: $11 million

The Property: This imposing stone mansion-23 rooms in all-is a relic of Lake Shore Drive's early days as an avenue dotted with opulent single-family homes. Built in 1890 in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, the house declined in the 20th...

Posted at 05:00 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/05/07

New on the Market - Lake Forest

List price: $11.495 million

The Property: What used to be a contemporary flat-roofed house is now a sophisticated French château with a gracious mansard roof sheltering a new second story. The makeover is the work of Don and Jan Zordani, the husband-and-wife team behind Milestone Development. They began, says Don, with an "extremely...

Posted at 09:31 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/04/07

Housing Bulletin - Incentives to Buy

The real-estate market has been giving off conflicting signs for months. That's making anybody who has a property to sell eager to get rid of it, just in case the signals go from confusing to bad.

Most expert observers agree that the worst-case scenario-the bottom dropping completely out of the local housing market-is not going to happen in Chicago. Still, nobody wants to be the one who sent up a signal flare by cutting prices-which is why builders and some individuals selling their own homes have been offering incentives to buyers. Throw something in without raising the price and you have effectively discounted the price without asking for less.

"We're seeing incentives galore," says Jim Merrion, the northern Illinois regional director for RE/MAX. Which means that if...

Posted at 04:24 PM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

04/02/07

Sale of the Week - Lake View, Chicago

Neighborhood: Lake View, Chicago
List price: $1.399 million
Sale price: $1.312 million

The Property: Built in 2004 by Pat Heneghan, this nine-room wood-frame home has four bedrooms, three-plus baths, three fireplaces, two wet bars, and a deck atop the two-car garage. The homey front porch belies...

Posted at 05:00 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)