Sale of the Week

Glencoe Joins the Cavalcade of Half-Price Mansion Sales

List Price: $2.05 million
Sale Price: $2.05 million
The Property: This has been the year of the half-priced new mansion, including a February purchase in Lake Forest, an April buy in Glenview, and my item last week about a sale in Winnetka.

This week’s entry is a new stone mansion in Glencoe originally priced at $4.295 million. It eventually sold as a short sale—a bank-approved transaction for less than the amount owed on the mortgage—for $2.05 million, or 47 percent of the original asking price. Built over a shallow ravine on a Glencoe street of imposing homes, the house has 14 rooms, including six bedrooms, five of them on the second floor.

High Gate Properties, which has constructed several lavish homes in Glencoe, built the place for a real-estate investor. A source tells me that High Gate has at least six custom homes under way in town, each one valued at more than $4 million. According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, High Gate spent $1.8 million in 2004 for a parcel of land in Glencoe. It split the land into three pieces and built on two of them. It sold the third piece to the real-estate investor, who then commissioned High Gate to build this home there, says Paula Weiss, a Prudential Rubloff agent who represented the home. She would not name the investor, who is not identified in public records.

“It has all the quality of a High Gate home,” says Weiss, who lists a slate roof, copper gutters, hand-cut brick, pricey Rocky Mountain Hardware for the doors, and Waterworks bathroom fixtures among the details. The interior, she says, is “very elegant and subdued, matching the architecture of the exterior.”

Weiss had represented the seller when the home was on the conventional market as well as when it dropped into short-sale status in the fall. By that time, “everyone who came to look at it came because it was by High Gate,” she says, and the ultimate buyers were one of several to make offers. While the listing sheet announced that the house would be sold “as-is,” Weiss says that there was no distress to the property, and that no repairs were needed before new owners could move in. The phrase merely signaled that the bank would make no buyer-specified changes to the property, she says.

The buyers, whom Weiss would not name and who are not yet identified in public records, “had been interested in the house when it first came on the market, but it wasn’t in their price range,” she says. “By this fall, it had come down into their price range.” The sale closed November 30th.

Price Points: A High Gate–built home on one of the other two pieces of land sold a few years ago for about $5.1 million; Weiss’s report and the Cook County Recorder of Deeds conflict on the precise amount.

Listing Agent: Paula Weiss of Prudential Rubloff; 847-881-8012

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