List Price: $2.585 million
Sale Price: $2.335 million
The Property: A marketing executive at the newly merged United–Continental Airlines bought this new 15-room house in Winnetka for $2.335 million—just 52 percent of the $4,478,500 mortgage that the home’s developers took out on the property four years ago.
Designed in a Nantucket style with a wide front porch and shingle upper siding, the house has five bedrooms, four-plus baths, and four fireplaces. The stylish kitchen is adjacent to a family room with a vaulted ceiling; the living room has a beamed ceiling, and the staircase curves up from a large foyer. Photos that accompanied the listing show extensive millwork in the home, mostly painted white, and many large multipaned windows. The basement has deep window wells that help bring light into the rooms down there as well. The property is a quarter-acre lot three blocks west of Lake Michigan and a short walk from Winnetka’s Village Hall, its downtown, and the pretty Village Green Park.
In October, the same month that the two airlines merged, Mark Bergsrud, who had been a senior vice president at the Texas-based Continental and is now United’s senior vice president for marketing, bought the house. The sale closed October 26th. Less than two weeks after the closing, Bergsrud scored a publicity bump for the airline with the unveiling of the farewell season plane for The Oprah Winfrey Show. Neither Bergsrud nor the sellers’ agent—April Callahan of the Hudson Company—responded to a request for comment.
Price Points: The house had been on and off the market since July 2007—at what price, I can’t determine—and by October 2009 its price was $2.790 million The price was cut the last time in May, to $2.585 million where it was when Bergsrud bought the home. In April 2006, a limited liability company that had purchased the lot in 2005 for $1.325 million took out a mortgage on the property for $4,478,500 from Mt. Prospect National Bank, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Later documents show that the loan was modified twice in 2007 and again in September 2010, but they do not spell out the modifications.
Listing Agent: April Callahan of The Hudson Company; 847-446-9600