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...

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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: $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...

" />
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Sale of the Week—Hand-built House in Skokie

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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…

On the Market—Jimmy Stewart in Noble Square

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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…

Housing Bulletin—Agents of Change

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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…

Sale of the Week—Roscoe Village Edwardian

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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…

On the Market—Garden Splendor in Fort Sheridan

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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…

Housing Bulletin—Who Benefits from Another Fed Rate Cut

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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…