There are many nice homes for sale or rent in Chicago, and there are some high-performing schools. But finding a home in the district of a good CPS school was a little like playing chess on two different boards at once—that is, until the introduction of SchoolSparrow…
Readers ask questions, and our real estate expert answers. This week, a reader named Pam from Lake View asks if she should sell her condo after receiving a newsletter from a real estate agent about a shortage in the housing market.
List Price: $2.499 million
Sale Price: $2.3 million
The Property: In the three years between going on the market at $3.595 million in June 2009 and being sold for $2.3 million in June 2012, this Oak Brook house underwent 38 price cuts—some as little as a dollar…
List Price: $895,000
The Property: It’s common in new buildings to have several floors of penthouses. But in a 1926 co-op on Lake Shore Drive in Lake View, there’s just one penthouse floor, the 17th, which can be reached only from the 16th floor by a private staircase…
Between 2009 and 2011, about 10 percent of Chicago’s rental housing passed through some stage of foreclosure, often leaving paid-up tenants in a gray area when a building’s foreclosing lender didn’t resell the place to a new landlord quickly. That’s where Nancy Enopena found herself this past winter after the Albany Park house where she rents a bedroom was without heat or hot water for five months—and without any water at all for several weeks…
Readers ask questions, and our real estate expert answers. This week, a reader named Joshua from Lincoln Square asks if current home prices need to come down in order for young adults—well-off or otherwise—to afford fairly modest homes.
List Price: $525,000
Sale Price: $525,000
The Property: Kurt and Mary Jane Neumann, who will move into Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home this week, feel ties not only to the famed novelist but also to the layout of the house where he grew up…
Foreclosures increased again in the Chicago area, threatening to push housing prices down even further, which are already at pre-2001 levels. Meanwhile, rent is going up—and rental incomes have vastly increased.
List Price: $2.395 million
The Property: In the early 1980s, John and Sarabess Cahill fell in love with New Mexico—only John’s business was in Evanston. What to do? “We brought New Mexico here,” Sarabess says…
As the warmth and ease of this sunny season kick in, many people dream of owning a summer home. In Benton Harbor, Michigan, an ambitious residential development around a golf course, also comes freighted with dreams of healing entrenched poverty and racial division and of restoring spoiled industrial land…
