Sale of the Week: Wax In, Wax Out at Chicago’s Olympia Centre

List Price: $1,299,000
Sale Price: $1,075,000
The Property: H. Fisk Johnson, the fifth-generation CEO of S. C. Johnson—the Racine, Wisconsin, consumer-products company behind Raid!, Pledge, Glade, and other brands—has sold his condo on the 51st floor of Olympia Centre (that’s the tapered red tower, at Chicago and Michigan avenues, with Neiman Marcus at its base). Johnson has had a home in the building for 20 years. The seven-room condo has two…

On the Market: Old World Elegance, Gold Coast Views

List Price: $3.6 million
The Property: The immense living room of this fifth-floor condo at the northern tip of the Gold Coast offers a majestic view over the lawns, soccer fields, and statuary in the southern stretches of Lincoln Park. “We thought of all that as our own front yard,” says John Benjamin, who, with his wife, Esther, has lived in this condo in the 13-story confection at 1550 North State Parkway for about 17 years (the building itself dates back…

Housing Bulletin: The Upside of 13 Canceled Condo Projects

In 2008, according to Appraisal Research Counselors, developers called off 13 downtown condo projects, pulling a total of 2,078 housing units out of an already log-jammed condo market. (Only one of those buildings—Burnham Pointe, at 720 South Clark Street—was already under construction; it was sold to an apartment developer.) While the cancellations aren’t necessarily happy news…

Sale of the Week: Among the Mega in Lincoln Park

List Price: $4.75 million
Sale Price: $5.05 million
The Property: This 13-room residence, with its ornate carved limestone and brick façade, stands among the new mega-homes along Burling, Orchard, and Howe streets south of Armitage Avenue in Chicago. The house has six bedrooms, six-plus baths, two fireplaces, and..

Housing Bulletin: And now, the rest of the story

Every Thursday except holidays, I post a short tour of a home that is for sale, including the sellers’ asking price. But the asking price is only half of the story, as the past year’s market drop has clarified for all of us; the other half is the final selling price.
So, as Paul Harvey would say, now here’s the rest of the story on several properties I posted on Thursdays in 2008…

Housing Bulletin: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Realtors Have Left the Building

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring—not even a real-estate agent eager to show off the granite countertops in the kitchen or the triangular Jacuzzi for two in the master bath. Instead, with home sales down more than 40 percent from the height of the market in 2006, agents have been departing the industry in large numbers. At the end of November, with roughly 57,100 members, the Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) had experienced a…