06/28/07

New on the Market - Landmark Prairie Bungalow in Beverly

List Price: $575,000 (update 7/5/07 - price reduced to $535,000)

The Property: This carefully renovated Prairie-style bungalow manages to be both livable and attentive to its role as a Chicago landmark. Many original details are intact, such as the distinctive hexagonal-mullioned windows and hand-hewn ceiling beams in the living, dining, and sun rooms. Others have been...

Posted at 07:56 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/27/07

Housing Bulletin - Marking Down House Prices

Call it a wave of price cuts or a market adjustment, but there is no way to mask the fact that people selling residential real estate locally have been dropping their asking prices in droves. Deal Estate combed through data from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois and found that one out of three single-family homes sold in the Chicago area so far this month were bought only after the initial asking price dropped at least once.

Solid data for comparisons to past years is not available, but several real-estate agents who have made sales this month agree that price cuts are unusually common right now. "What's happening is that people who priced their homes in early spring are coming down now anywhere from 5 to 10 percent," says Mary Duncan, the sales...

Posted at 07:54 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (4)

06/25/07

Sale of the Week: Palos Park Jumbo

List Price: $1.75 million
Sale Price: $2.2 million

The Property: This handsome 8,500-square-foot brick home is in Shadow Ridge, an exclusive new Palos Park subdivision where some houses are valued as high as $4.5 million, according to Laura Burns, the Century 21 agent who sold this one for JB Builders.

Shadow Ridge's 54 acres,...

Posted at 09:17 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/21/07

New on the Market - Three Mansions

Chicago’s residential real estate may not be selling as briskly as it did a few years ago—particularly on the high end. That hasn’t stopped people in the city and suburbs from putting their pricey pads up for sale. Case in point: a trio of distinctive 19th-century mansions that have recently hit the market.

Posted at 07:56 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/20/07

Housing Bulletin - Should Home Sales Help Fund Mass Transit?

With Illinois' General Assembly at an impasse over a new budget, it's desperation time for funding mass transit. Now a key state legislator has proposed a transit finance plan that includes a steep increase in the tax paid by Chicagoans selling real estate. The increase would tack on an additional $3 tax (per $1,000 in the sale price) to the current transfer charge ($7.50 per $1,000). For a home sold at the Chicago median price of $267,000, the transfer tax would go up from $2,002.50 to $2,803.50. (In addition, Chicagoans would continue to pay a $1.50 per $1,000 transfer charge to Cook County, an amount that will not change under the proposed legislation.)

The Chicago Association of Realtors is aggressively fighting the proposal. "You want to tell people in this market...

Posted at 07:51 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/18/07

Sale of the Week-A New Sales Record for Lincolnwood

List Price: $2.44 million
Sale Price: $2.1 million

The Property: Far larger than the neighboring ranch houses, this ten-room, 5,000-square-foot home topped the previous sales record for Lincolnwood by $750,000 when it was sold June 5th. Custom built for the current owners, the house (in the Lincolnwood...

Posted at 09:48 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/14/07

New on the Market - Quirky Condo in Chicago's Old Town

List Price: $750,000

The Property: This eccentric two-bedroom condo is one of 16 units in the landmark Carl Street Studios (at 155 West Burton Place). The offbeat building began taking shape in 1927, when Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller, who had met at the School of the Art Institute, took an enormous brick Victorian mansion on then Carl Street and...

Posted at 07:58 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/13/07

Housing Bulletin - Auction Action

With just 30 percent of their condos sold at a time when they had hoped to have 80 percent spoken for, the developers of the Bluestem, a contemporary residential building on Wolf Road in Westchester, announced this week that they will put the remaining units up for auction in July. It is the latest in an emerging trend toward auctioning off slow-moving condo inventory that at least one auction house says is dwarfing all the old numbers.

"The amount of over-supply in the marketplace is opening opportunities for us," says Frank Diliberto, the president and CEO of Inland Real Estate Auctions, whose company will auction the Bluestem's 32 unsold units. On Monday, Inland got another...

Posted at 05:30 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (3)

06/11/07

Sale of the Week - Hinsdale

List Price: $3.428 million
Sale Price: $2.75 million

The Property: This 9,400-square-foot house is one of several newcomers on a street in southeast Hinsdale. It has four levels, including the basement, all served by an elevator. "You can stand on the top floor and look all the way to the lowest level as the staircase winds around," says Joanne McCafferty, the Brush Hill Realtors agent who sold the house for the builder, Eagle Crest.

Although the 12-room house has a busier façade than some of the more refined homes-both new and old-in its prestigious neighborhood, it does have all the requisite luxury touches....

Posted at 06:13 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/07/07

New On the Market - Chicago's Gold Coast

List price: $2.195 million

The Property: This slender townhouse, built in 1883, stands on one of the Gold Coast's loveliest streets, punctuated on its east end with a view of Lake Michigan across Lake Shore Drive. The beautifully renovated house-owned by Frank James, an executive at Bear Sterns, and his wife,...

Posted at 01:19 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/06/07

Housing Bulletin - An Update from Chicago's Lakeshore East

Over the past five years, seven high-rise residential towers have gone up at Lakeshore East, the 28-acre development west of Lake Shore Drive between Randolph Street and Wacker Drive. Until now, the development has seemed a little bereft of life, even though those seven high-rises encircle a six-acre park filled with fountains, lawns, and play areas for children and dogs. But all that is about to change now that construction has begun on the so-called Parkhomes: 24 single-family homes, some lined up like townhouses and some stacked atop one another. They are the first of at least 45 street-level homes to be built around the park, says James Loewenberg, the co-CEO of the Magellan...

Posted at 10:00 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/04/07

Sale of the Week – East Lake Shore Drive, Chicago

List Price: $4.55 million
Sale Price: $4.55 million

The Property: About 12 years ago, this ten-room condo comprised half the palatial spread bought by Oprah Winfrey, though, by most accounts, the TV star never moved in. Today, this 4,700-square-foot space on the seventh floor of 219 East Lake Shore Drive-one of only eight...

Posted at 05:55 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)