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…

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…

Lawsuit Claims Developer Hasn’t Honored Buy-Back Contract

In 2008, hoping to reassure potential condo buyers that any further slide in the market wouldn’t hurt them, the Kopley Group development company offered a full-price buy-back guarantee on two of its North Side developments. The company’s chief, Nick Kopley, told me then that this was an “absolute, no questions asked” offer; the company made similar comments to the Chicago Tribune and Yo Chicago…

An Armour Mansion in Lake Forest

List Price: $5 million
The Property: This classically styled 12-room mansion on a bluff in Lake Forest that overlooks Lake Michigan has its fine points, and I’ll get to them. But first, a nod to its former resident, the formidable Sarah Wood Armour, who was a key supporter of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for over five decades and the daughter of Robert Wood, who helped build both the Panama Canal and Sears, Roebuck & Co. Mrs. Armour bought the house in 1980 with her husband, the philanthropist and businessman Andrew W. Armour III of the meatpacking family…

Lincoln Park’s Two Battlefields

In recent months, two groups of Lincoln Park residents have been fighting proposals that they believe will have a negative impact on their neighborhood—and the two battlegrounds are just three blocks apart on Webster Avenue. “There’s a lot going on over there on Webster these days,” says Alderman Vi Daley (43rd)…