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Ad Categories: Real Estate

Sale of the Week—Breaking the Mold in Glen Ellyn

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List price: $600,000
Sale Price: $545,000
The Property: When a homeowner owes more than a house is worth, that’s called being “under water.” In the case of this house, the term took on a double meaning.

The sellers of this house had bought the place in July 2006 for $800,000. The next year they moved to New York before they were able to sell the home, says their agent, RE/Max’s Christopher Kouros. Eventually the sellers, whose names do not appear in public records, dropped their asking price to…

On The Market—A Tudor Manor in Highland Park

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List Price: $2.9 million
The Property: This grand old home 75 yards from the Lake Michigan blufftop in Highland Park evokes the early 20th-century age of big North Shore country houses. With its peacock fan of gable beams above a cozy inglenook entry, it would have been a happy place to arrive after a long…

Housing Bulletin— City Condos Provide a Little Good News—for Now

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Numbers out last week from the Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) showed a big drop-off in home sales for Illinois in March from the same month in 2007. But Chicago stood out in two ways. The number of sales here dropped by a far smaller percentage than in the rest of the state. What’s more, the median sale price was up in Chicago, although it was down in…

Guest Blog: The Year of Burnham Begins

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A few playful catcalls greeted the architect Louis Sullivan last week at the Union League Club. Actually it was a photo of Sullivan flashed on a movie screen, a preview of an upcoming documentary by the Chicago filmmaker Judith McBrien about the architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. The movie, called Make No Little Plans, is slated to premiere next year in Millennium Park, part of a summer-long centennial salute to Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. You can see the film’s trailer here…

Sale of the Week—Renter Buys His Mag Mile Penthouse

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List Price: $3.6 million
Sale Price: $3.6 million
The Property: A large 54th-floor penthouse in the 55 East Erie tower changed owners last week, but no movers were involved. Sanjay Khosla, an executive vice president of Kraft Foods and president of the company’s Kraft International unit, had been renting the 4,500-square-foot, three-bedroom condo from Michael Giambrone; on April 23rd, Khosla bought…

On the Market—Lake View’s Painting Lady

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List Price: $1,850,000
The Property: The colorist behind this “painted lady”—a 120-year-old Queen Anne with 14 different hues of paint accentuating its intricately detailed exterior—is Tracy Hurst, Lake View’s painting lady. Hurst, who has lived in the house since 1987 with her husband, Taylor, and their kids, painted the entire exterior herself over three summers in the late 1990s. She did a terrific job, bringing out the…

Housing Bulletin—How Low Can You Go?

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The builders who completed a new 4,000-square-foot house on Pine Street in Winnetka last year had hopes of selling it for around $3.2 million. But the real-estate market fell progressively downward, until eventually the builders had no idea what the house was worth anymore. In March, they found out: It sold for $1,926,000, or 39 percent less than they had hoped.

The real-estate auction house Sheldon Good & Co. sold the property for the builders in an unusual way…

Sale of the Week—Down on Armour’s Lake Forest Farm

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List Price: $2,099,000
Sale Price: $1,975,000
The Property: It’s only four years old, but with its low arches, brick corner quoining, and hefty, detailed chimney, this ten-room home in Lake Forest looks as if it might have been plucked out of the English countryside a century ago. That’s what makes it so well suited to its surroundings, a hilltop neighborhood of about 50 gentry homes that overlook one of the prettiest pieces of countryside…