Deal Estate - July 2009

08/17/09

Less Than Half its Original Price—Glenview

List Price: $969,000
Sale Price: $880,000
The Property: Originally offered by its builder at $2.1 million, this 12-room Glenview house sold at foreclosure on July 6th for $880,000—or 41.9 percent of what the builder had once hoped to get for it...

Posted at 12:00 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/30/09

In a Modernist Mood—Oak Park

List Price: $650,000
The Property: On an Oak Park block of mostly traditional, two-story homes, this low, linear modernist house looks like the shy one. It has a long, almost blank brick façade; the only visible breaks are for the entry courtyard and the carport. (There is also a single set of windows, but landscaping hides them from view.)
But that street-front reticence disappears when you get inside, where the house...

Posted at 11:05 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/29/09

Will You Get the Nod for a “Loan Mod”?

For a homeowner whose mortgage has become unaffordable because of a lost job, an interest-rate reset, or some other reason, the prospect of getting the loan’s terms modified sounds good—but the process can be confusing and dispiriting. That’s why a California company led by a veteran mortgage banker has devised...

Posted at 07:18 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

07/27/09

Former Bears QB Makes the Handoff—Glencoe

List Price: $2,449,000
Sale Price: $2,125,000
The Property: The quarterback Brian Griese, who played for the Chicago Bears from 2006 to 2008, has sold his house in Glencoe for $300,000 less than he paid for it in 2006...

Posted at 07:48 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/23/09

Sleek, But Not Slick, in Bucktown

List Price: $2,199,900
The Property: The exterior of this ten-room home on a Bucktown corner lot is a strict geometrical composition of glass, block, and aluminum, but you only have to get one step inside to feel it loosen up. There, on a coat closet in the foyer, builder Darek Nisi hung a pair of rough-hewn antique doors from India that counteract the cold or sterile feeling of some exactingly contemporary interiors.

Posted at 12:42 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/22/09

Google’s Home Sales Tools

For people selling their homes in this withering sales climate, every little bit might help. One place sellers might not have thought to look for an edge is Google, where there’s also now a new tool for buyers.
On July 8, Google introduced a Google Maps addition that calls up listings for real estate at or near a mapped...

Posted at 10:40 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/20/09

House with $800,000 in Upgrades for Under $1.5 Million, in Lake Forest

List Price: $1,795,000
Sale Price: $1,475,000
The Property: Tucked into a secluded setting, this 17-room Lake Forest house sold July 8 for 38 percent of the $3.895 million that its sellers wanted for it back in 2007.
But that’s not all...

Posted at 08:11 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/16/09

Little Big Mies, on Lake Shore Drive

List Price: $259,000
The Property: When the great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed his now-iconic twin residential towers at 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive, completed in 1951, the small and lightless kitchens and baths were in keeping with the era’s attitude, but they look..

Posted at 09:33 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (2)

07/15/09

He Chases Foreclosures So You Don’t Have To

Christian Chase knows foreclosures. He should—his past seven homes have all been foreclosures that he bought, cleaned up and (except for the one he lives in now) put back on the market.
“To me, it doesn’t make sense to buy something on the retail market when you can buy a [foreclosed home] so far under the market,” Chase says. And these days, deeply discounted distress-sale properties are virtually..

Posted at 07:35 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/09/09

Lake Forest’s Schweppe Mansion

List Price: $18 million
UPDATED Price Reduction as of 7/10: $15 million
The Property: This grand home on Lake Forest’s Mayflower Road is truly one of the most magnificent ever built in Chicago. The 27-room mansion was completed in 1915 as a wedding gift from John G. Shedd, then the president of Marshall Field & Co., to his daughter, Laura, newly married to Charles Schweppe...

Posted at 12:28 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (5)

07/08/09

Middle-Income Foreclosures Fall Into the Gap

By now, it’s pretty well known that the foreclosure crisis is no longer limited to lower-income households. Large numbers of middle- and upper-income homeowners are falling into default, too. But a new report from the Woodstock Institute points out that, in many parts of the Chicago region, more affluent households are far less likely than lower-income homeowners to get specialized counseling about the foreclosure process—and that could potentially...

Posted at 09:01 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/06/09

Well-Manored in Beverly

List Price: $1,400,000
Sale Price: $1,075,000
The Property: With its assortment of beams, arches, and crenellations, this brick and limestone mansion on a Beverly hillside suggests an old English home that has been added to and changed over many generations. Locals speculate that was the intention of...

Posted at 07:20 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/02/09

A Keck House in its Retro Prime—Budlong Woods

List Price: $1.399 million
The Property: Typical of the mid-century modern houses designed by Keck & Keck, this house in Budlong Woods presents to the street a low, somewhat inscrutable profile and then opens big inside: the L-shaped, 1,000-square-foot living and dining area has a 38-foot-long south wall that is virtually all windows...

Posted at 01:41 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/01/09

Bill Rancic Buys and Sells—and Other Celebrity News

Bill Rancic, the Chicagoan who first won Donald Trump’s TV reality show The Apprentice, has turned out to be the buyer of a foreclosed condo at the Park Tower that I wrote about here in early June. Rancic had also shown up in the July issue of Chicago after he and his wife sold a Gold Coast graystone for...

Posted at 07:38 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 2009