Deal Estate - March 2008

03/31/08

Sale of the Week—Builder’s Loss, Buyer’s Gain in Burr Ridge

List Price: $1,199,000
Sale Price: $1,300,000
The Property: The buyer of this 15-room house in Burr Ridge got a real bargain, even though the house, left unfinished by the builder who lost it to foreclosure, lacks a few essentials. For instance, it still needs shower doors and a door between the garage and the house, and the builder removed the kitchen appliances and some light fixtures prior to giving title to the bank. And while...

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

03/27/08

On The Market—Kenilworth’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles House

List Price: $2,773,000
The Property: The quintessential center-entry Colonial, this Kenilworth house stood in as the warm family home Steve Martin’s weary, irritable character desperately wanted to reach in time for Thanksgiving dinner in the 1987 movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles. “If I had a big life-sized photo of Steve Martin, I would put it in the window every Thanksgiving,” says Jeanie Schneider, who bought the house in 1996 with her husband, Wes. “Every Halloween, children come to the door and ask...

Posted at 08:59 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

03/26/08

Housing Bulletin—Lake View’s Meeker Mansion

In May 2005, the managers and residents of AIDSCare, a Lake View hospice, were startled to learn that they had 90 days to move out of the dilapidated mansion and coach house they had shared with an order of nuns for a dozen years. The nuns were members of the Society of Helpers of the Holy Souls, which for six decades had occupied the 16,000-square-foot Meeker Mansion at 3030 North Lake Shore Drive. They had sold the...

Posted at 06:44 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/24/08

A Contemporary Lake Forest Farmhouse

List Price: $1,599,000
Sale Price: $1,300,000
The Property: The architect Frederick Phillips designed this simple but striking house in 2000 for his widowed, 80-something mother, Katherine Bennett, who had lived nearby in a renovated 19th-century barn for four decades. “She only needed a few rooms,” says Phillips, “but she had always cherished her views of the woods around her.” Phillips designed a house that put all his mother’s needs—kitchen, living and dining room, bedroom, bathroom, and a big deck—on the second floor, with windows all around and elevator access from the...

Posted at 10:36 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (2)

03/20/08

On The Market—Hinsdale’s House of Treasures

List Price: $6.3 million
The Property: Brian Baetz and his company, the Lemont-based Morgan Builders, have been putting up houses and entire subdivisions in the west and southwest suburbs for two decades. But this six-bedroom, 9,300-square-foot house, which was completed in November in Hinsdale, is Baetz’s pet project. Inspired by the centuries-old homes outside Paris, it is a repository of . . .

PLUS: a bonus video - walking tour with the builder

Posted at 08:14 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (5)

03/19/08

Housing Bulletin—Irene Pritzker Sells Her Kenilworth Mansion

Irene Pritzker, the former wife of Robert Pritzker—who, with his brother Jay, turned a family fortune into a financial empire best known for its Hyatt hotels and resorts—has sold her 13-room Kenilworth mansion for $2,775,000. A handsome brick and limestone villa roofed in green terra cotta and situated on four-tenths of an acre, it has five bedrooms and a...

Posted at 09:25 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/17/08

Sale of the Week—Doing a Double Take in River North

Southeast Condo - List Price: $4.95M - Sale Price: $4.95M
Northeast Condo- List Price: $4.65M - Sale Price: $4.7M
The Properties: Two adjacent nine-room penthouses occupying parts of the 59th and 60th floors of the Millennium Centre (at 33 West Ontario Street) sold over the past few weeks, each for more than $4 million. Although the penthouses went to separate buyers, their sales were connected. Only the northeast penthouse was on the market in November, when two different buyers showed strong interest, says Steve Graf, the @Properties agent who was representing that unit. So he approached the owner of....

Posted at 09:47 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/13/08

On The Market—TV Time in Old Irving Park

List Price: $749,000
The Property: This four-bedroom condo occupies the top (fourth) floor of a nondescript building on busy Pulaski Avenue in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood. But once the private elevator ascends and the doors open on a Chinese red foyer decorated with beads and vases, the commonplace has clearly been left behind. Off to the left...

Posted at 08:33 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/12/08

Housing Bulletin—Who Owns Your Home?

There is a timeworn joke about home ownership that has gained new relevance over the past few months. It’s one you’ve likely heard before, and maybe even made yourself. Making light of the fact that we claim to “own” our homes—when in fact, for many homeowners with mortgages, the bank technically owns the lion’s share—we say something along the lines of, “We own one bedroom and a piece of...

Posted at 07:52 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/10/08

Sale of the Week—At a Loss in Northbrook

List Price: $1.85 million
Sale Price: $1.65 million
The Property: Built in 1940, when Northbrook was a sleepy little village, this genteel 12-room house evokes that simpler era with its stone gateposts and tall trees, its large screened sunroom, its swimming pool and broad lawn. But thanks to a successful kitchen...

Posted at 09:13 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/06/08

On The Market—A River North Penthouse Atop Mother Cabrini’s Former School

List Price: $2.8 million
The Property: The brick and copper Beaux-Arts cornice of the former Assumption School—founded in 1899 by Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini—conceals a big two-bedroom penthouse that goes on the market today. Situated in a new fifth-floor rooftop addition, the contemporary unit spans the...

Posted at 09:43 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/05/08

Housing Bulletin—What Sells Now—and How

Nobody was especially surprised when the Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) announced last week that home prices had dropped in January 2008 when compared to prices in January 2007. The drop—2.2 percent in the Chicago area and 5.3 percent for the state of Illinois—was the first year-to-year price drop since at least 1998, when the IAR started tracking that statistic. There was one bright spot...

Posted at 09:08 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/03/08

Sale of the Week—Rumsfeld’s Former Gold Coast Home

List Price: $1.8 million
Sale Price: $1.75 million
The Property: The ten-room Gold Coast condominium where Donald Rumsfeld lived for 15 years before moving to Washington, D.C., to become Secretary of Defense in 2001 has been resold by the family who bought the place from Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce. Set on the south end of the third and fourth floors of a handsome early 20th-century brick and limestone building that has just a ...

Posted at 10:17 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 2008