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Ad Categories: Real Estate

Housing Bulletin—Who Owns Your Home?

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There is a timeworn joke about home ownership that has gained new relevance over the past few months. It’s one you’ve likely heard before, and maybe even made yourself. Making light of the fact that we claim to “own” our homes—when in fact, for many homeowners with mortgages, the bank technically owns the lion’s share—we say something along the lines of, “We own one bedroom and a piece of…

Sale of the Week—At a Loss in Northbrook

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List Price: $1.85 million
Sale Price: $1.65 million
The Property: Built in 1940, when Northbrook was a sleepy little village, this genteel 12-room house evokes that simpler era with its stone gateposts and tall trees, its large screened sunroom, its swimming pool and broad lawn. But thanks to a successful kitchen…

Photo Contest: Sears Tower Love

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Reports from yesterday about the retrial of the men accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower has got us thinking about the building we often take for granted. Towering above all the rest (that is, until Donald Trump completes the phallic homage to himself), the Sears Tower anchors our skyline and appears in more photos than we’re able to count.

This abstract view of the mammoth structure, taken by Flickr’s inetmer, is one of our favorites. What’s your favorite shot of the Sears Tower? Send them our way with…

Housing Bulletin—What Sells Now—and How

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Nobody was especially surprised when the Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) announced last week that home prices had dropped in January 2008 when compared to prices in January 2007. The drop—2.2 percent in the Chicago area and 5.3 percent for the state of Illinois—was the first year-to-year price drop since at least 1998, when the IAR started tracking that statistic. There was one bright spot…

Sale of the Week—Rumsfeld’s Former Gold Coast Home

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List Price: $1.8 million
Sale Price: $1.75 million
The Property: The ten-room Gold Coast condominium where Donald Rumsfeld lived for 15 years before moving to Washington, D.C., to become Secretary of Defense in 2001 has been resold by the family who bought the place from Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce. Set on the south end of the third and fourth floors of a handsome early 20th-century brick and limestone building that has just a …

On the Market: A Gold Coast Condo with a Suburban Feel

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List Price: $1,095,000
The Property: The 16-story Elm Tower, at Elm and Dearborn streets, is a six-year-old building designed to look and feel like the vintage co-ops of the Gold Coast. When he was building it, the developer, Jim Letchinger, told me he had grown up in the neighborhood and wanted to put up something that captured the intimate, urban feeling of the 1920s residential buildings he loved there…

Housing Bulletin: An Upgraded Web Site for City and Suburban House Hunters

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Thanks to some cool upgrades that launched last week, Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today’s market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a “sale by owner”—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with…