List Price: $3.295 million
The Property: When Robert and Emi Kelsey bought an old Tudor house in Winnetka ten years ago, it was sort of discombobulated. Some decades before, previous owners had sold off the property in front of the house and tacked an awkward entrance onto the back, and there were a couple of staircases but no main stairway…
Demolition is well underway on the Gold Coast home where Frank Lloyd Wright lived briefly with a girlfriend (and future wife) while not yet divorced from his first wife. On Tuesday, the owner of the site told me that once the old residence is razed, construction will start on a four-story home designed “to look like it’s been there 100 years, to look correct for the neighborhood…”
List Price: $2.25 million
Sale Price: $1.95 million
The Property: Robert Parrillo, a Chicago lawyer who was part of the investor team that in 2009 rescued the Chicago Sun-Times from bankruptcy, has sold a four-bedroom condo at the Park Newberry and is moving to the highest residential floor of the luxe Elysian…
List Price: $549,000
The Property: You’ve heard the term “vanilla box” condos? Condos at the Carl Street Studios are more like tutti-frutti. Converted from a Victorian mansion into a complex of artists’ homes in the 1920s, Carl Street (which is actually on Burton Place) is unlike anything else in the city with its layers of eccentric artistry, unusual materials, and crazy-quilt colors…
Last Thursday, the Chicago City Council passed a vacant building ordinance designed to get mortgage lenders with a financial stake in vacant foreclosed properties to help keep them from falling into disrepair. Four days later, Moody’s Investors Service issued a report arguing that the ordinance may actually discourage lenders from making mortgages in Chicago neighborhoods where foreclosures are concentrated…
List Price: $890,000
Sale Price: $840,000
The Property: This substantial Victorian, built in 1906 for a man whose family construction business developed large swaths of homes in Oak Park and the Far West Side of Chicago, sold in just 15 days this May…
A Lake Forest mansion recently owned by a retired VP from Baxter International, which features a stunning library addition by Howard van Doren Shaw and a hidden “speakeasy” bar, sells for less than half its 2008 asking price.
List Price: $1,299,999
The Property: In the early 1990s, when many of their friends in the northwest suburbs were buying vacation homes around Lake Geneva and Walworth County, Martin Nowakowski and Sharron Ames found their getaway closer to home in North Barrington…
A recent RealtyTrac/Trulia survey revealed that 85 percent of current homebuyers are interested in distressed properties—residences that have been foreclosed or are being offered as short sales. At the same time, the city and suburbs possess a substantial stock of distressed condos, lost either by homeowners or by developers. But buying a foreclosed condo has … Read more
The next mortgage payment on Christine O’Malley’s Grayslake townhouse is due Monday, but she’s probably not going to pay it. “I’ve been on my own since I was 18, and I’ve always paid my bills,” says O’Malley, 53. She is employed as a co-owner of an e-learning company, says she has credit scores in “the high 700s, 800s,” and has been trying to sell the three-bedroom townhouse for more than a year…
