List Price: $1,699,500
Sale Price: $1,550,000
The Property: A now-retired executive who joined the banking superstar Jamie Dimon in Chicago has now followed his old boss’s lead in another way: selling his home at about half what he’d been asking for it.
James Boshart III came to Chicago from Salomon Smith Barney in 2000 to take a senior post at Bank One, where the New Yorker Dimon had recently assumed the top spot. Both men had previously worked at Citigroup. When he arrived here, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, Boshart paid $2.725 million for a top-floor three-bedroom condo in the 1550 North State Parkway building, a ten-story limestone-bedecked classic designed by Benjamin Marshall in 1912.
In 2004, Dimon merged the bank with JP Morgan Chase. Boshart took a seat on the executive committee of the now New York-based firm but remained in Chicago. He retired at the end of 2004 and put his condo on the market in 2005. I could not determine his listing price then, but in 2008, he was asking $3 million. The condo, renovated before Boshart bought it, has two fireplaces, cherry flooring, a solarium, and ten-foot ceilings, as well as views north over Lincoln Park and the lakefront. By mid-2010, with the price cut to $2.6 million, the home was still unsold, and Boshart took it off the market.
Last month, the Koenig & Strey agent Meredith Manni Meserow approached Elizabeth Ballis, the agent who had had Boshart’s listing, and said she knew an interested buyer. “We put it back on the market, and they made an offer that my seller was pragmatic about and took,” Ballis says.
The sale, to buyers not yet identified in public records, closed December 16th. The sale price is 51 percent of Boshart's 2008 asking price and 56 percent of his 2000 purchase price. (I could not track down Boshart to ask for comment.) Dimon’s Gold Coast mansion sat on the market unsold for three years before selling at 50 percent of the $13.5 million he had originally asked for it.
Price Points: Meserow says that her clients “made money on the buy, so they can afford to put money into the total gut restoration [the condo] needs. It was very dated.” She says that if they spend about $1 million on the renovation, for a total investment of $2.55 million, “they would be right in line with the comps in the building.” In early 2009, a condo in the same tier as Boshart’s was sold for $2.85 million. Later that year, a condo in a tier of larger units (with four bedrooms) went for $3.15 million.
Listing Agent: Elizabeth Ballis of Coldwell Banker; 312-867-8122 or Elizabeth@elizabethballis.com