List Price: $1,450,000
Sale Price: $1,325,000 The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.
The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that...
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List Price: $1,450,000
Sale Price: $1,325,000 The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.
The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that...
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List Price: $1,450,000
Sale Price: $1,325,000 The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.
The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that...
Sale Price: $1,325,000 The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.
The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that…
List Price: $1.149 million The Property: Behind the dignified 103-year-old façade of this Logan Square greystone stands a contemporary interior by the ultra-stylish Funke Architects. Its most dramatic element is a hanging staircase of steel, glass, and maple. It floats beneath a rooftop pop-up of clerestory windows that let daylight cascade all the way to the basement, creating a far lighter mood than the characteristically dark interior of a historical greystone.
That lightness carries through the three-story structure. The main floor is an airy layout of formal and informal spaces, including a sleek kitchen with…
In the mid-1980s, when Melissa and Alan Bean bought their first home, in Elmhurst, they didn’t know until after they had signed all the papers that they had taken out a very risky mortgage, one that included a provision for “negative amortization”—the alluring possibility of paying less per month than the interest accrued. (A loan like that can quickly turn into an upside-down situation, where the homeowner owes more than the house is worth.) It was a mistake the couple corrected as soon as they understood what they had done.
Two decades later, Melissa Bean, now representing Illinois’ 8th District, (Chicago’s northwest and far north suburbs) in the U.S. House of Representatives, is trying to help correct the effects of high-risk…
List Price: $1,399,000 Sale Price: $1.300,000 The Property: This new 13-room brick and stone house in Skokie’s Devonshire Highlands neighborhood has many custom perks. Among them: motorized lifts on the chandelier and the staircase light fixture (to make cleaning easier); a built-in hutch in the dining room; handsome library shelving; and insulated windows with operable blinds installed between two panes of glass.
The house is the work of a rare builder who actually does much of the construction with his own hands. Anthony Youseph, who has been…
List Price: $449,000 The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777…
Have you wondered what real-estate agents have been doing with their time during this super-slow market? Well, it seems many of them have been pressed into service as lobbyists. Over the past two weeks, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has been urging its membership to push Congress and the President to enact sensible rule changes on lending that could help huge numbers of homebuyers better afford their houses. At the same time, the Chicago Association of Realtors (CAR) has been waging a vigorous campaign against the proposed increase in the city real-estate transfer tax that is a key part of the state’s mass-transit funding package. The Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) has signed on to the coalition CAR pulled together for that fight.
First, let’s look at the national picture. NAR’s efforts revolve around a potential change in the guidelines that define a jumbo mortgage. Jumbo mortgages have a higher interest rate than other loans; the idea is…
List Price: $1,599,000 Sale Price: $1,550,000 The Property: The rich Edwardian detail of this new Roscoe Village house sets it apart from its contemporaries in the neighborhood. There’s the Mary Poppins–impression of the façade, with headboards and shutters adorning the windows, a slate-shingled gable front, and a pair of fluted Doric columns flanking the front door. The layers of detail continue inside: in the living room, with a row of five Ionic columns between stained-glass panels displaying a Greek key pattern; in the staircase, with a wood-trimmed half-moon cutout in the wall…
List Price: $2.45 million The Property: When the picturesque but obsolete Fort Sheridan military base on the Lake Michigan bluffs between Highland Park and Lake Forest was being converted to a residential neighborhood in the late 1990s, a key member of the redevelopment team, Richard Stein, called dibs on what must have seemed at the time like a questionable parcel. While some of his teammates snapped up handsome blufftop homes that had housed the base’s top officers, Stein took a long, squat building a few blocks from the lakefront…
The Federal Reserve is widely expected to cut its rate again later today, but that doesn’t mean you should call your mortgage broker this afternoon in search of a lower payment. You should have called yesterday.
There is a widespread misconception that mortgage rates are directly connected to the Fed’s funds rate. In fact, the relationship is more along the lines of “Me and My Shadow”: the two tend to move approximately in step with one another, but neither one orders the other around.
“Mortgage bond markets meet every day, much more often than the Fed,” says Dan Green, a mortgage planner and loan officer at Mobium Mortgage here in Chicago and the author of themortgagereports.com. “Most of what the Fed is responding to has already been…
