Sale of the Week

Former Microsoft Exec Buys Penthouse Surrendered by the Developer Dan McLean

List Price: $3.499 million
Sale Price: $2.850 million
The Property: A 5,200-square-foot riverside penthouse that a court ordered sold by its developer and owner, Dan McLean, to help settle debts from an Atlanta real-estate investment was bought in late January by David Vaskevitch. Until 2009, Vaskevitch was the chief technology officer of Seattle-based Microsoft.

McLean is a veteran Chicago developer who has played major roles in Lincoln Park, the South Loop, and River East, the neighborhood—west of Lake Shore Drive and north of the Chicago River—where this penthouse occupies part of two floors atop a 27-story tower.

The penthouse has lavish finishes throughout and a 1,600-square-foot terrace with views of Lake Michigan, Navy Pier, and the skyline. “There’s a beautiful paneled library, the kitchen was [designed] for gourmets, and you have crown moldings and millwork and floors that were really well done,” says Michael Mazzei, the Koenig & Strey Real Living agent who sold the home for JP Morgan Chase, the bank that received title to it in August 2010 via a judicial order. Floor-to-ceiling windows fitted with electronic shades surround much of the interior. (Here’s a tour of the interior that my colleague Rochelle Vayo-Adkinson taped for her old CLTV and WGN show, HomesPlus, a couple of years ago, when the property was listed with a different agent.)

According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, McLean paid $2.052 million for the penthouse in October 2001, buying it from River View East LLC, the arm of his MCL Companies that built a pair of towers known as River View. I could not determine whether that price included the finishes or was for unfinished space only. McLean declined to comment. In July 2006, according to the recorder, he took out a $3.3 million mortgage on the penthouse. In March 2010, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, a Cook County Circuit Court judge ordered the condo sold as part of McLean’s settlement of a personal guarantee he had made four years earlier on a $24 million loan that was used to buy a large Atlanta apartment complex.

The sale of the condo closed on January 27th. Vaskevitch, whose name does not yet appear in public records of the sale, was identified to me as the buyer by two real-estate sources who both asked not to be named because of professional relationships with the real-estate agency. I could not reach Vaskevitch for comment.

Price Points: McLean had the home on the market for $4.89 million in late 2009. When JP Morgan Chase got the penthouse, it initially listed the place for $4.5 million, but it wasn’t until after a second price cut—to $3.499 million at the end of November—that any serious offers materialized. The sale price—58 percent of McLean’s original asking price—amounts to $548 per square foot. Mazzei says that high-end condos in the surrounding neighborhoods have been selling for $600 to $1,000 per foot (the low end, he says, was for condos whose finishes were inferior to today’s subject property).

Listing Agent: Michael Mazzei of Koenig & Strey Real Living; 773-491-9893

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