A Bridgeport Surprise: Buyers Fill Up Phase One

I was skeptical last March when a developer showed me around a rubble-strewn site on the north side of Bridgeport where he was planning to unveil a development of 29 new homes. The area around the site, sandwiched between the Stevenson Expressway and the South Branch of the Chicago River, is a somewhat isolated patch three blocks wide that is filled with small industrial buildings and modest, dowdy older houses…

Gouletas Son Short-Sells Penthouse at the Sterling

List Price: $899,000
Sale Price: $885,000
The Property: In 2001, when Nicholas V. Gouletas was an executive with the family-owned firm that built the Sterling at 345 North LaSalle Drive, he posed for a publicity photo slicing into a five-foot-tall cake in the shape of the 50-story building. More recently, he did some cutting of a different kind, slashing the price on his 2,700-square-foot, 47th-floor condo…

Family-Friendly Renovation in Lake Bluff

List Price: $2.395 million
The Property: “I’ve become a lover of sunrises because of living here,” John McKinven says of the circa 1938 home where he and his wife, Lynn, and their children live, across the street from Lake Bluff’s sublime blufftop Sunrise Park.

Beachfront Winnetka Home Scores Top Price Since 2006

  WINNETKA LIST PRICE: $6,750,000 SALE PRICE: $6,621,300 A new 16-room mansion with a 112-foot private beach on Lake Michigan was sold in March for more than $6.6 million—Winnetka’s priciest house sale in four years. Built on a nearly one-acre lot on a secluded block-long lane, this house has an elaborately detailed limestone façade and … Read more

REO Investors Jump on the Speedwagon

How did the principals of Speedwagon Properties, a Northbrook real estate investment firm, come up with a corporate moniker that riffs on the name of a classic-rock act? In real estate parlance, foreclosed property that is in the hands of a bank is often called REO, for Real Estate [Department] Owned. So it was probably inevitable…

What $1 Million Buys This Month

The Properties: What kind of house does $1 million buy in Chicago right now? A fixer-upper. At least, that’s what three homes in the city that have each sold for exactly $1 million since July 1st have in common: They all have rehab ahead or, in one case, demolition…