Your Best Offer
Three real-estate agents provide us with their assessment of a new North Shore house
Ad Categories: Real Estate
Sale of the Week—Get Width It in Ravenswood
List Price: $2.05 million
Sale Price: $2.35 million
The Property: Not yet finished but already sold, this raised 12-room house is super-wide by city standards: a full 40 feet, on a lot that is 43 feet wide. “It’s totally suburban,” says Brent Meder, whose Meder Properties built it, as he walks across…
On The Market—Lake Forest’s Chimneys Cottage, Reborn
List Price: $11,995,000
The Property: Originally built in the 1890s by a retired Confederate general as a small summer cottage book-ended by two chimneys, this house grew in several directions over the years. By the time Tim and Gail Anderson bought it in 1999…
Housing Bulletin— A Gloomy Forecast from the University of Illinois’ Geoffrey Hewings
On Monday I talked with Geoffrey Hewings, a professor of geography, economics, and urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The director of REAL, the university’s Regional Economics Applications Laboratory, Hewings tracks residential real estate across the state; his forecasts are part of the Illinois Association of Realtors’ periodic reports. In the organization’s latest report, released at the end of July, Hewings predicted that…
Sale of the Week—Surf and Turf in Lake View
List Price: $2,349,000
Sale Price: $2,235,000
The Property: One of ten new high-end houses that front on a private greensward where a street would ordinarily be, this 13-room Italianate brick house has six bedrooms, five-plus baths, and two fireplaces. An 11th house that also shares the common green, along with a clubhouse with a swimming pool and…
On The Market—An East Lake Shore Drive “Starter Home”
List price: $2.25 million
The Property: A three-bedroom condo on the sixth floor of an elegant building overlooking Chicago’s Oak Street Beach, this is what the listing agent Mitch Serrano calls “a starter home on East Lake Shore…
Housing Bulletin—Inventive Incentives
What’s keeping people from buying homes right now? Are they worried that a property’s value will drop after they buy it? Or are they wondering what will happen to the economy when we have a new president? Or maybe they are scared that if they buy a condo, they won’t be allowed to swim naked in the…
Sale of the Week—The Bronzeville Home of Two African American Pioneers
List Price: $1.2 million
Sale Price: $1.125 million
The Property: Until its sale earlier this month, this vintage 1895 brownstone had remained for 50 years in the family of a pioneering African American couple. In 1958, Claude Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett bought the 12-room residence, and its enormous lot, on what was then…
On The Market—A Big Green Rehab in Highland Park
List price: $2.8 million
The Property: With an indoor pool, a typically hard-to-heat two-story living room and foyer, and a total of 9,000 square feet of indoor space, this Highland Park house used to be an energy hog. But thanks to the installation of solar and geothermal energy collectors, it now consumes a…
Housing Bulletin—Behind the Fall in Round Lake
In most of the Chicago area, the number of home sales is down about 30 to 40 percent this year, according to MRED, the real-estate data service. In the Round Lake section of Lake County, it’s down 77.9 percent. That means only a little more than one-fifth as many houses have sold there in the past 12 months as did in the prior year. And some agents in town say…