List price: $975,000List price: $975,000List price: $975,000
List price: $975,000
The Property: While searching for a home, Zbigniew and Beata Banas became accidental developers. They found a property they liked—a shuttered church in the Irving Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side—but the building, a simple peaked structure with a spire piercing its roof, proved far too large for just one…
The latest reports show that the tide of foreclosures keeps rising. Last week, Realty Trac reported that one of every 538 mortgaged homes in Illinois is in some stage of foreclosure. (In the Chicago metropolitan area, Kane County had the highest concentration—1 in 415 mortgages—and DuPage County had the lowest: 1 in 734.) The week before, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that 2.5 percent of all mortgages were…
List Price: $3.3 million
Sale Price: $2.93 million
The Property: When this 57th-floor penthouse atop The Heritage at Millennium Park first went on the market in July 2007, the sellers were asking $4.4 million. By the time they sold the 4,668-square-foot space with north, east, and west views, they had cut the asking price to $350,000 less than …
List Price: $2.45 million
The Property: One of a pair of limestone homes built in the early 1880s, this nine-room, three-story Gold Coast house has a stately charm inside, from the columns that frame the open dining room to the Second Empire mantelpiece in the living room. Original details—such as the hefty wood front door and…
In Highland Park, where the average home sale price is $769,000, there is a development of ten townhouses being built right now with price tags ranging from $165,000 to $239,000. The complex, which will also have four rental apartments and several important green features, is a good example of what can happen when a municipal government throws its …
List Price: $1.495 million Sale Price: $1.235 million The Property: All but invisible from the street, this mid-century modern house—designed by the architect Ed Dart to hug the rim of a Lake Forest ravine—was the home of Charles Walgreen from 2005 until late last month. The 12-room house is made of cedar, brick, steel and … Read more
List Price: $1.550 million (house on left/south) $ 1.500 million (house on right/north)
The Property: This pair of new houses has many sustainable features: solar panels, recycled roofing, paints and carpeting that emit little or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). They even feature permeable paving in the front sidewalks so that storm water can…
The house in Homer Glen that the state of Illinois seized from the rapper and convicted con artist Eric “Blaxican” Jaglicic sold on May 30th for $380,000—which is $30,000 more than the asking price. As readers may recall from my April 17th blog (which includes a video tour), this is the house with a shark tank in the dining room, an alligator pen in the basement, and a liberal use of…
List Price: $979,000
Sold Price: $949,000
The Property: This Riverwoods house sold on May 5th for 9.6 percent less than the sellers had paid for it just 14 months earlier. The sellers—Janice Ferri Esser, a writer for TV soap operas, and her husband, Robert Esser—were not able to sell their prior home, according to the listing sheet for this property, so they…
List Price: $799,000
The Property: While Jersey Avenue on Chicago’s Northwest Side is fairly noisy with traffic, this house and its five same-style neighbors create a wall that hides the quiet, leafy treasure that lies behind them: a long stretch of…
