Deal Estate - July 2008

07/31/08

On The Market—An East Lake Shore Drive “Starter Home”

List price: $2.25 million
The Property: A three-bedroom condo on the sixth floor of an elegant building overlooking Chicago’s Oak Street Beach, this is what the listing agent Mitch Serrano calls “a starter home on East Lake Shore...

Posted at 08:56 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/30/08

Housing Bulletin—Inventive Incentives

What’s keeping people from buying homes right now? Are they worried that a property’s value will drop after they buy it? Or are they wondering what will happen to the economy when we have a new president? Or maybe they are scared that if they buy a condo, they won’t be allowed to swim naked in the...

Posted at 08:50 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/28/08

Sale of the Week—The Bronzeville Home of Two African American Pioneers

List Price: $1.2 million
Sale Price: $1.125 million
The Property: Until its sale earlier this month, this vintage 1895 brownstone had remained for 50 years in the family of a pioneering African American couple. In 1958, Claude Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett bought the 12-room residence, and its enormous lot, on what was then...

Posted at 11:16 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (2)

07/24/08

On The Market—A Big Green Rehab in Highland Park

List price: $2.8 million
The Property: With an indoor pool, a typically hard-to-heat two-story living room and foyer, and a total of 9,000 square feet of indoor space, this Highland Park house used to be an energy hog. But thanks to the installation of solar and geothermal energy collectors, it now consumes a...

Posted at 10:15 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/23/08

Housing Bulletin—Behind the Fall in Round Lake

In most of the Chicago area, the number of home sales is down about 30 to 40 percent this year, according to MRED, the real-estate data service. In the Round Lake section of Lake County, it’s down 77.9 percent. That means only a little more than one-fifth as many houses have sold there in the past 12 months as did in the prior year. And some agents in town say...

Posted at 07:46 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/21/08

Sale of the Week—Trading Up from the Park Tower

List Price: $1.4 million
Sale Price: $1.3 million
The Property: This two-bedroom condo on the 44th floor of the prestigious Park Tower at 800 N. Michigan Ave. was the “in-town” second home of a pair of Indiana physicians for seven years, until they traded up this year to a...

Posted at 07:22 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/17/08

On The Market—Spacious Cape Cod in Wilmette

List Price: $1,099,000
The Property: Unlike ostentatious new houses that flaunt their thousands of square feet with soaring roofs and phallic turrets, this Cape Cod–style house in Wilmette is a classic 1950s exercise in self-restraint, with a taupe exterior and a sheltered porch. The broad, low-hanging roof suggests a modest house huddles beneath, but, in fact, there are...

Posted at 09:24 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/16/08

Housing Bulletin—The Money’s on Naperville, Again

City-lovers who refuse to venture west of Harlem Avenue may not get why a whole lot of other people have such affection for Naperville, but the town collected yet another laurel on Monday, when Money magazine released its 2008 list of the best places to live in the United States. Naperville was No. 3, after towns in Minnesota and...

Posted at 07:47 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/14/08

Sale(s) of the Week: Two $9-Million North Shore Sales in Two Days

The Properties: July started off with a bang on the North Shore, and that’s not a reference to the many fireworks displays hosted by towns and country clubs. Two separate lakefront mansions sold for stratospheric prices: on July 1st, a Kenilworth estate went for $9,710,913, and two days later, one in Wilmette went for...

Posted at 10:13 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/10/08

On The Market—Downsizing in Lincoln Park

List Price: $1.495 million
The Property: Nine years ago, this redstone townhouse from the early 1890s and its neighbor to the east were coupled together in an unusual approach to expandable housing. In 1999, when their family of five was outgrowing the house on the east (where they had lived since 1980), Susan and Tom Kuczmarski bought this house to...

Posted at 08:17 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/09/08

Housing Bulletin—Amy Jacobson Sells Her Lake View “Dream Home”

Amy Jacobson, a former reporter for WMAQ–Channel 5, has sold her four-bedroom Lake View graystone for $938,000—a 4.2 percent gain over the purchase price three years ago, but a significant loss, says Jacobson, given what she...

Posted at 07:23 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (10)

07/03/08

On The Market—Hinsdale’s New-Old Stone Mansion

List Price: $4.9 million
The Property: You will be forgiven if, when approaching this new house in Hinsdale, you wonder whether they hauled it over from England in pieces or already assembled. The rough-hewn stone façade, the sheltered entry vestibule with timber beams and...

Posted at 05:54 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (3)

07/02/08

Housing Bulletin—A Green Demolition, in Northfield

The developer who paid $1.2 million for a Northfield lot where he plans to build six condos could have had the old house there demolished in two days, at a cost of about $15,000. Instead, he’s paying twice that—and the...

Posted at 06:38 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 2008