Deal Estate - June 2008

06/30/08

Sale of the Week—An Evanston House Swap

List Price (Tudor): $2.975 million
Sale Price: $2.975 million
List Price (Brick): $1.295 million
Sale Price: $1.225 million
The Properties: The owners of these two homes swapped houses—even though it wasn’t an even trade. In fact, as you can see, one residence is worth more than twice the other...

Posted at 09:22 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/26/08

On The Market—Glenview’s Passage to India

List Price: $4,495,000
The Property: At this 14,000-square-foot house in Glenview, a pair of large, intricately carved front doors made of sagwan wood open into a granite-floored foyer illuminated by a crystal chandelier. While the chandelier is Austrian, the wood and the granite are from...

Posted at 08:47 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/25/08

Housing Bulletin—Victory Gardens’ Real-Estate Reality Check

In Relatively Close, the new James Sherman comedy that opened at Victory Gardens Theater last week, three adult sisters and their families gather at their late parents’ longtime summer home in Union Pier, Michigan. One of the sisters wants to sell the place, and she’s planning to spend the week convincing her sisters it’s a ...

Posted at 04:16 PM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/23/08

Sale of the Week—In Highland Park, Bad News for a Bear

List Price: $995,000
Sale Price: $950,000
The Property: For 20 years this 13-room Highland Park house belonged to Dave Duerson, who was on Super Bowl–winning teams with the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants. But Duerson recently lost...

Posted at 08:01 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/19/08

On The Market—You Can Ring My Bell, in Irving Park

List price: $975,000
The Property: While searching for a home, Zbigniew and Beata Banas became accidental developers. They found a property they liked—a shuttered church in the Irving Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side—but the building, a simple peaked structure with a spire piercing its roof, proved far too large for just one...

Posted at 09:43 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/18/08

Housing Bulletin— A Foreclosure and its Neighbor, In Glenview

The latest reports show that the tide of foreclosures keeps rising. Last week, Realty Trac reported that one of every 538 mortgaged homes in Illinois is in some stage of foreclosure. (In the Chicago metropolitan area, Kane County had the highest concentration—1 in 415 mortgages—and DuPage County had the lowest: 1 in 734.) The week before, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that 2.5 percent of all mortgages were...

Posted at 07:50 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/16/08

Sale of the Week—At The Heritage, a Sky-High Price Cut

List Price: $3.3 million
Sale Price: $2.93 million
The Property: When this 57th-floor penthouse atop The Heritage at Millennium Park first went on the market in July 2007, the sellers were asking $4.4 million. By the time they sold the 4,668-square-foot space with north, east, and west views, they had cut the asking price to $350,000 less than ...

Posted at 07:55 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/12/08

On The Market—House with a Sphinx, Gold Coast

List Price: $2.45 million
The Property: One of a pair of limestone homes built in the early 1880s, this nine-room, three-story Gold Coast house has a stately charm inside, from the columns that frame the open dining room to the Second Empire mantelpiece in the living room. Original details—such as the hefty wood front door and...

Posted at 07:52 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/11/08

Housing Bulletin— Affordable and Green in Highland Park

In Highland Park, where the average home sale price is $769,000, there is a development of ten townhouses being built right now with price tags ranging from $165,000 to $239,000. The complex, which will also have four rental apartments and several important green features, is a good example of what can happen when a municipal government throws its ...

Posted at 10:41 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/09/08

Sale of the Week—Charles Walgreen Sells His Lake Forest House

List Price: $1.495 million
Sale Price: $1.235 million
The Property: All but invisible from the street, this mid-century modern house—designed by the architect Ed Dart to hug the rim of a Lake Forest ravine—was the home of Charles Walgreen from 2005 until late last month. The 12-room house is made of cedar, brick, steel and glass, all of which extend from the exterior to the...

Posted at 08:55 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/05/08

On The Market—Green Twins in Lincoln Square

List Price: $1.550 million (house on left/south) $ 1.500 million (house on right/north)
The Property: This pair of new houses has many sustainable features: solar panels, recycled roofing, paints and carpeting that emit little or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). They even feature permeable paving in the front sidewalks so that storm water can...

Posted at 10:20 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/04/08

Housing Bulletin—A Buyer for Blaxican’s Homer Glen House

The house in Homer Glen that the state of Illinois seized from the rapper and convicted con artist Eric “Blaxican” Jaglicic sold on May 30th for $380,000—which is $30,000 more than the asking price. As readers may recall from my April 17th blog (which includes a video tour), this is the house with a shark tank in the dining room, an alligator pen in the basement, and a liberal use of...

Posted at 07:40 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/02/08

Sale of the Week—Riverwoods’s Real-Estate Soap Opera

List Price: $979,000
Sold Price: $949,000
The Property: This Riverwoods house sold on May 5th for 9.6 percent less than the sellers had paid for it just 14 months earlier. The sellers—Janice Ferri Esser, a writer for TV soap operas, and her husband, Robert Esser—were not able to sell their prior home, according to the listing sheet for this property, so they...

Posted at 08:39 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 2008