NORTH CENTER FROM $370,000 TO $399,000 Despite the slowdown in new construction, Jim Jaeger, a veteran developer in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood, intends to embark on his second environmentally friendly building this spring. Inspired by the success of Eco North, his 16-unit project at 1820-1842 West Irving Park Road, Jaeger now plans to build an identical … Read more
Remodeling projects don’t pay off as well at resale time as they used to, according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors and Hanley Wood, a media company geared toward the construction industry. What’s more, most Chicago projects reap a smaller payback than the national average. “You have a lot of competition … Read more
Homes brought back to their old glory “from the ground up”
FULTON MARKET FROM $1.25 million TO $1.3 million Plan A didn’t quite work out for his project in the 800 block of West Fulton Market, so now the developer John Madonis is pursuing plans B and C. Plan A—which Madonis carried over in 2007 from an earlier project at Lake and Morgan streets—was to erect a … Read more
NORTH MICHIGAN AVENUE LIST PRICE: $4.4 million SALE PRICE: $4.1 million The October sale of a condominium in the Park Tower eclipsed any prices in that building going back two years, before the onset of the real-estate decline. “We were only on the market for three and a half months, which is good [these days], and we got 93.7 … Read more
List Price: $1.95 million
The Property: A cocktail of genres, this house has a harsh 1970s exterior, an interior rich in Victorian ornamentation, and an atrium that could have been borrowed from a Spanish-style home. And while distinctly urban, the place has a big yard worthy of a residence in the suburbs.
The new 50-story apartment building opening tomorrow at 215 West Washington Street is only the second rental residential high-rise built in the Loop. The first, 200 North Dearborn, was completed in 1989 and later…
List Price: N/A
Sale Price: $6,884,500
The Property: James J. McNulty, the former CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, has bought the entire 37th floor of the Elysian, the new 60-story hotel-and-condos tower, designed by Lucien Lagrange, at 11 East Walton Street. This is the highest…
List Price: $7.95 million
The Property: When I first visited this Lake Forest house (in 2002, when it was only a year old), I could hardly take my eyes off the living room ceiling, a soaring masterpiece of beams, arches, and planking, all crafted from trees from the same Wisconsin grove. Recently I made a…
Last Wednesday on WGN Radio, John Williams and I were talking about “strategic defaults.” That’s the current term for the situation where people walk away from their mortgaged home, figuring that its value has dropped so far that they will never make anything on it. Williams and I both opposed the practice. Here is how some other people feel.
