A Sears House Grows Up, in Sauganash

List Price: $499,900
The Property: Fourteen years ago, Jim and Lisa Whittington bought a tiny Sears Catalog house built in the 1920s in the leafy, charming Sauganash neighborhood on the city’s far northwest side. Although it was originally a two-bedroom house with…

Two Derelict Glencoe Houses Face Different Fates

Among the architectural treasures of Glencoe are two small collections of homes designed by eminent 20th-century architects—and each of those neighborhoods has a derelict house, a victim of the recent housing bust.

Ravine Bluffs is a cluster of six homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1910s. The derelict house there now has a savior, a Chicago architect who…

Green developer Jim Jaeger attempts encore of Eco North in North Center

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

Report: Remodeling shows smaller payback than in the past

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

Stalled sales prompt developer to change course in Fulton Market condos

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

Sale of Park Tower condo recalls boom years

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