Jun 15, 2009

Sale of the Week

Sale of the Week: A Tale of Four Houses—North Shore

Today’s house, once carried a price tag of $5.1. On May 26th, the bank sold the unfinished house for $1 million.

List Price: $1.9 million
Sale Price: $1 million
The Property: Today’s house, situated in an unincorporated area near Winnetka, once carried a price tag of $5.1 million. But that price was for a finished home—and not only was this house never finished, but the company that built it ended up handing the home back to its lender, Mutual Bank, last October. On May 26th, the bank sold the unfinished house for $1 million.

What’s more, that same builder turned over to Mutual Bank the house next door, which is closer to be being completed than this one. According to Jean Royster, the Coldwell Banker agent who represented both homes, that next-door house currently has a sale pending.

Today’s featured house is a ten-room residence with four bedrooms and six-plus baths on an acre of land overlooking a pond. As of June 11th, it was still cloaked in a Tyvek underwrap, with no exterior finish over that. I could not tell how much of the interior had been completed. Royster would not comment on how much work remains to be done on the house, and I could not track down the builder. But Frank Lardino, the @Properties agent on a nearby house, says today’s house is “more unfinished than finished.”

Today’s house and its neighbor are two of four homes built on Longmeadow Road in an unincorporated area west of Winnetka. From 1923 to 1934, the area served as a setting for foxhunts. The four houses were built on a parcel of land (about four acres) that until 2006 held a single older home. All four of the new houses wound up in some stage of distress.

Price Points: County records do not reveal what the builder’s limited liability company, Longmeadow Road LLC, paid for the land on which the four homes were built. But in April 2006, Longmeadow Road LLC sold two lots from the original parcel of land for $3 million. (Going west to east, let’s call them lot 1—the site of today’s house—and lot 2, the house with a sale pending.) Around the same time, it sold a third lot (lot 3) to a different LLC, for $1.55 million.

The house on lot 4 is finished. In October 2008, Mutual Bank took over the deed to that house, although county records are not clear on whether it was taken from the same builder as was handing over lots 1 and 2 at about the same time. Either way, in March, Mutual sold the house on lot 4 for $2.65 million, when its asking price was $3.9 million.

The completed house on lot 3, which Lardino represents, is now “in a short sale situation,” he says. That house was listed at $4.5 million, but the price was later reduced to $3.9 million. “With what’s going on with the [other Longmeadow] houses,” says Lardino, “we realized we’d have to short-sale it”—that is, let it go for less than the builder owes on it. The asking price is now $2.99 million.

The most recent asking price for the house on lot 2—the one that Royster says has a sale contract pending—was $2.7 million, down from $4.999 million. Royster would not disclose the sale price. The buyer of the house on lot 1—today’s featured property—is not yet identified in public records.

Listing Agent: Jean Royster, Coldwell Banker, 847-234-8000
 

Posted at 08:45 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink

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