Deal Estate - March 2011

03/31/11

Big Ben

List Price: $2.499 million
The Project: By far the largest home in the St. Ben’s neighborhood, this newly completed mansion fills the shell of a former six-flat apartment building. The builder Bill Varney took advantage of the wide, shallow structure to create a home whose expansive southern façade lets virtually every room bask in sunlight...

Posted at 10:12 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/30/11

New Apartments Restore Dr. King’s Legacy in North Lawndale

This spring, for the first time in more than 40 years, people will be living at the same North Lawndale address as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family did in 1966, when he came here to dramatize the desperate state of housing in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods...

Posted at 10:05 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (4)

03/29/11

Ex-Blackhawk Byfuglien Sells in Roscoe Village

Dustin Byfuglien, a key player on the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup–winning squad who now skates for the Atlanta Thrashers, on Monday closed on the sale of his former Roscoe Village home. The sale price was $1.08 million—14 percent less than the $1.265 million Byfuglien paid for the newly built 12-room house in December 2008...

Posted at 9:31 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/28/11

Cook County Republican Bound for Texas Sells in Wilmette

List Price: $829,000
Sale Price: Not available
The Property: Roger Keats, the Republican candidate who lost last fall’s election for president of the Cook County Board, has pronounced himself sick of corruption in Illinois and sold his Wilmette home to move to Texas...

Posted at 9:39 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (2)

03/24/11

The Blue White House in Chatham

List Price: $899,900
The Property: In 1966, a couple named Smith built their homage to the White House—only they used imported blue Italian brick. The home has long been a landmark in Chatham, known for its Georgian porch and pillars, its bright blue walls, and its size: the place is about 7,900 square feet, compared to about 1,000 to 1,200 feet for the smaller brick residences that surround it...

Posted at 10:53 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/23/11

Tax Referendums May Understate Economic Impact on Homeowners

When voting April 5th on local tax referendums, voters in ten Cook County communities may get the impression that any increase on their property-tax bills will be only about a third of the actual increase...

Posted at 9:27 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/21/11

A Ravenswood House with a North Chicago Clone

List Price: $1.699 million
Sale Price: $1.606 million
The Property: In 1891, just three years after founding the company that would grow into the pharmaceutical giant Abbott Labs, Wallace Abbott built this 15-room house in what was then the Chicago suburb Ravenwsood...

Posted at 9:30 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (2)

03/17/11

A Miniature Chateau in Highland Park

List Price: $799,000
The Property: Although the North Shore has many grandly scaled chateaux, this Highland Park home demonstrates that grandeur can come in medium-size packages, too. All the architectural detail and lavish finishes of some of the area’s finer residences are tucked into an eight-room house designed to feel like a centuries-old home in France’s Brittany region...

Posted at 12:18 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/16/11

Six Things to Do in Short-Sale Territory

A report last week from CoreLogic showed that 25.4 percent of Chicago-area homeowners with a mortgage are now underwater—they owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth—and another 5.3 percent are near that point. There’s no way of knowing how many of those people will have to sell their homes this year, but if you’re at or near the short-sale line, the first thing to do is pull your head out of the sand...

Posted at 12:30 PM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/14/11

A Good Deal on a Car Dealer’s Winnetka House

List Price: $1 million
Sale Price: $900,000
The Property: In 2006, federal marshals seized this 7,400-square-foot, five-bedroom Winnetka house after its owner was charged with selling scores of luxury cars to Chicago gang members for cash as a way of helping them launder millions of dollars in drug profits...

Posted at 9:25 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/10/11

Loft Takes Its Cue from the West Loop

List Price: $1.15 million
The Property: Cue-wielding pool players get some of the best views in this 4,200-square-foot loft in an old West Loop industrial building. Look out one set of tall windows and they get a straight shot of the Sears Tower; look out the other and they see more old industrial buildings and a clock tower...

Posted at 10:15 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (2)

03/09/11

Two Eco-Friendly Chicago Renovations

Analysts are saying that home remodeling should pick up this year, and with rising energy prices a constant concern, it’s smart to factor resource savings into any rehab. At two Chicago homes, green was the key in nearly all aspects of their recent renovations...

Posted at 11:23 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/07/11

A Realistic Deal in Naperville

List Price: $825,000
Sale Price: $775,000
The Property: Three of the strikes against this 13-room home in a high-end Naperville subdivision are hard to hide: the empty lot on either side of the house and the third vacant lot behind this property’s nicely landscaped quarter-acre...

Posted at 9:23 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/03/11

Going Green in Holstein Park

List Price: $1.299 million
The Property: With its conservative brick and limestone façade, this house—in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Holstein Park section of northwest Bucktown—doesn’t try to dominate its older neighbors...

Posted at 11:59 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/02/11

Bringing Stability Back to Chicago Lawn

With its blocks of classic bungalows and brick two-flats, Chicago Lawn was for decades a Southwest Side bastion of middle-class stability. More recently it had become a glaring example of the devastation wrought by the foreclosure crisis...

Posted at 11:11 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 2011