Sale of the Week

A Deep-Discount Foreclosure Moves Fast, in Park Ridge

List Price: $348,480
Sale Price: NA
The Property: Impressive on the outside, this 13-room Park Ridge house might originally have been quite nice inside, too. But sometime during the foreclosure process, the interior was stripped of appliances, the furnace, light fixtures, and other amenities. In early 2006, the home’s builder, Antoni Dolegiewicz, had the newly completed brick and stone home on the market for $1.549 million—more than four times what the foreclosing lender asked for the home in its as-is condition on August 20th of this year.

More than 72 potential buyers toured the property in the next three days, and by 5 p.m. on Monday, August 23rd, the bank had all-cash offers from 12 bidders, the highest of which may have been more than $520,000. Naomi Campbell, the agent who sold the house for the bank, cannot yet disclose the top bid, but she said it was “over 150 percent of what the bank was asking.” (When she gives me the sale price in about three weeks, after the deal is finalized, I will update this post.)

Since seeing her sell a Glenview foreclosure super-fast last spring, I’ve been following Campbell, who specializes in unloading banks’ properties quickly. When she got the bank’s final go-ahead to put this one on the market, at 1:55 p.m. on August 20th, she called me. By the time I got to the house, at 2:30 p.m., one potential buyer was already waiting for her. In the next two hours, three more potential buyers showed up. For the next few days, “it was a feeding frenzy,” Campbell says. “I was playing traffic cop” in the cul-de-sac where the house is located.

Shortly after each buyer walked in, Campbell would rattle off the home’s defaults: “There are no furnaces, there are no light fixtures, there are no potties, the intercom is gone.” With four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a two-story foyer, and three fireplaces (on one of which, the thick hearthstone had been pried up, leaving only the scars of an industrial adhesive) and a fine location, the house will make a lovely home when it has been repaired. Click through my photos below to see both the home’s amenities—such as a warm living-dining room pair—and its deficits, including the empty spot where the furnace used to stand. Campbell would not disclose details about the winning bidders, other than to say they are not investors but homeowners who plan to live in the property when it is fixed.

Campbell would not identify the seller. The Cook County Recorder of Deeds shows that Washington Mutual lent Dolegiewicz $826,000 on the property in 2006. The seller this month was presumably Chase, which picked up Washington Mutual’s portfolio when it bought the company in 2008.

Price Points: The bank’s asking price of $348,480 is just 72 percent of the $484,000 that Dolegiewicz paid for the lot in January 2005. If the bank got $520,000 for the place, it recovered 63 percent of the amount lent against the home in 2006.

Listing Agent: Naomi Campbell of Coldwell Banker; 847 370 5065 or naomi.campbell@cbexchange.com

Posted in Sale of the Week

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