02/28/08

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

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...

Posted at 10:16 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/27/08

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

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...

Posted at 09:16 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/25/08

Sale of the Week—First Resale at Trump’s Tower

List Price: $1,025,000
Sale Price: $890,000
The Property: Less than a month after the hotel floors opened at Trump International Hotel & Tower, a 21st-floor hotel-condo unit has become the first residence in the 92-story building (which is still under construction) to be resold by...

Posted at 07:43 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/21/08

On the Market—To the Manor Reborn-Winnetka

List Price: $3,997,000
The Property: In 2002, Marge Johnsson bought this red brick manor house—which had been designed nearly 100 years earlier by the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw—as the freshman rehab project for Magnolia Restorations, the company she was then launching. “I wanted to do it the way Shaw would...

Posted at 10:00 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/20/08

Housing Bulletin—Kerry Wood Takes a Loss

Kerry Wood has sold his house in Chicago’s Old Town Triangle for $1,201,000. That’s $2,000 more than he was asking at the time it sold, but $94,000 less than he paid for it in 2004—which means the Cubs pitcher took a 7 percent loss on the property.

In October 2004, Wood and his wife, Sarah, paid $1,295,000 for this house on a narrow 19th-century street a few blocks west of Lincoln Park. Built in 1876 (most likely by German immigrants), the seven-room, three-bedroom house has been...

Posted at 11:05 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

02/18/08

Sale of the Week—A Princely Old Town Rowhouse

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...

Posted at 06:54 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/14/08

On The Market—A Hanging Stair in Logan Square

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...

Posted at 07:45 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/13/08

Housing Bulletin—U.S. Representative Melissa Bean on the Mortgage Crisis

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...

Posted at 09:15 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/11/08

Sale of the Week—Hand-built House in Skokie

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...

Posted at 06:37 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (3)

02/07/08

On the Market—Jimmy Stewart in Noble Square

Posted at 09:08 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/06/08

Housing Bulletin—Agents of Change

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...

Posted at 07:21 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/04/08

Sale of the Week—Roscoe Village Edwardian

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...

Posted at 09:11 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)