Sale of the Week
Former Sun-Times Editor Michael Cooke Sells in Wilmette
List Price: $1,275,000
Sale Price: $1,165,000
The Property: Michael Cooke, who served two stints as editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, has sold his house in Wilmette. “We haven’t severed links with Chicago,” Cooke says. “We may keep an apartment.”
Cooke’s first tour of duty at the Sun-Times began in 2000, when he was brought in from the Vancouver Province by the Sun-Times publisher David Radler. (Seven years later Radler paid back $64.1 million to the Sun-Times Media Group because of financial schemes he participated in with the now-imprisoned media mogul Conrad Black.) Cooke left the Sun-Times to edit the New York Daily News in January 2005, but returned to the paper a year later. He again left the Sun-Times last February, this time to become editor of the Toronto Star.
In January 2006, Cooke and his wife, Barbara, paid $1,237,500 for a newly built 11-room house on a street of older homes in east Wilmette. The house has five bedrooms and three fireplaces. Cooke says that he and his wife chose the house because it was within the New Trier Township High School District (their third child was in high school then) and because the neighborhood was full of “lovely trees.” And then there was the convenience of the Linden el stop (just around the corner from the house) on the CTA Purple Line. Cooke says that he rode the El nearly every day, alongside “all those Tribune readers.”
The sale closed November 17th. The names of the buyers have not yet appeared in public records.
Price Points: The Cookes lost $72,500 on their sale of the Wilmette house (not counting agents’ fees and other sale costs). But in November 2008, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that the Cookes had turned a quick $247,000 profit by flipping a condo they had bought at Trump International Hotel & Tower. Considering the Trump and Wilmette sales together, the Cookes are ahead by about $174,500.
Listing Agent: N/A
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Reader Comments:
Amazing that an apartment in the Trump can be "flipped." It seems like that definition is usually reserved for taking a dilapidated or dated property, making a smallish investment and getting larger returns (or at least that's the hope). For something that is only a few years old, I wonder what kind of a "flip" could be made... or if they were just able to take advantage of a lower buying price and a higher selling price (rare in this market, but potentially possible).