Deal Estate - September 2009

09/30/09

Who’s Buying at 1994 Prices?

This is one of the rougher properties we have, but somebody’s going to turn it around,” Kristian Harris said as we stood in the bashed-up bathroom of the house at 6027 South Marshfield in Englewood. The plumbing fixtures were all out of order, the floors and walls were beaten up, and...

Posted at 08:46 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (3)

09/28/09

Blackhawks’ Barker Buys in Bucktown

List Price: $1.249 million
Sale Price: $1.1 million
The Property: Cam Barker, the 23-year-old Blackhawks defenseman who signed a three-year, $9.25-million contract with the team in early July, has bought a condo on the top floor of a new building in Bucktown...

Posted at 09:15 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/24/09

The Great Terrace — Glencoe

List Price: $4.2 million
The Property: A new ten-room residence on a quiet block-long street that ends at a Lake Michigan overlook, this house has an overlook of its own: a super-sized third-story terrace with a view over the ranch house next door to the lake.

Posted at 09:17 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/23/09

The Hardest-Hit Communities

Each October, with help from Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), Chicago publishes its annual real-estate chart, which, among other things, shows the average price of a house in all 77 city neighborhoods and more than 200 suburbs. The chart also notes how this year’s prices compare to the prior year and to 1994, the earliest year for which MRED has data for most of those neighborhoods and towns. Usually that comparison with 1994 is a heartening measure of the long-term growth in the value of a Chicago-area home.

Posted at 09:24 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/21/09

Tony Winner Dunagan Buys in Lincoln Park

List Price: $999,000
Sale Price: $912,500
The Property: Deanna Dunagan, who won a best actress Tony Award for her performance as a matriarch addicted to painkillers in August: Osage County, has bought a vintage condo overlooking Lincoln Park...

Posted at 09:52 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/17/09

Shakespeare in the (Lincoln) Park

Shakespeare in the (Lincoln) Park
List Price: Unit C-3 — $999,000
List Price: Unit D-1 — $999,000
The Property: These two condos in the building known as the Shakespeare Co-Op have approximately the same floor plan and exactly the same price. But both places have different finishes, most notably in...

Posted at 10:08 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

09/16/09

Burr Ridge Drops Out of the $1-Million Club

Chicago’s annual real estate-charts in its October 2009 issue (which hits newsstands this week) reveal lots of declines in both sale prices and the number of homes sold in 288 Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs. But one decline demands a closer look: what happened in Burr Ridge? That suburb...

Posted at 07:16 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/14/09

Twitter’s New COO Sells in Wilmette

List Price: $1,449,000
Sale Price: $1,400,000
The Property: Two weeks before he was named chief operating officer of the San Francisco-based microblogging service Twitter, Dick Costolo sold his 12-room home in central Wilmette...

Posted at 08:30 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/10/09

A Three-Way at Carl Street Studios

List Price: $2.6 million
The Property: Beginning in the late 1920s, Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller, two former classmates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, transformed a faded Victorian mansion in Lincoln Park into what Kogen originally hoped would become an artists’ compound like those he had seen in Paris’s Montmartre district. Unable to rein in their urge to...

Posted at 01:13 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/09/09

Johnson’s Stacks

Over the past few months, as the new 47-story condo tower at Van Buren and Franklin Streets has taken shape, it’s become clear that the city has another Ralph Johnson dazzler on its hands. Known as 235 Van Buren, the building impresses from all viewpoints, be it the seemingly crazy pattern of box balconies projecting off the south side; the ribbon of concrete running...

Posted at 08:33 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/07/09

Ex-Cub Mark Prior Sells His Lincoln Park Townhouse

List Price: $695,000
Sale Price: $676,000
The Property: The pitcher Mark Prior has sold the Lincoln Park townhouse that he bought in 2002 several months after arriving in Chicago to great expectations. Prior left the Cubs in December 2007, but he didn’t put the four-bedroom townhouse on the market until...

Posted at 07:17 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/03/09

Urban Wowboy

List Price: $1.899 million
The Property: Among the sharpest buildings from the city’s recent years of condo buildup is the five-year-old Contemporaine, a modern 15-story concrete and glass design by the estimable Ralph Johnson.

Posted at 01:12 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/02/09

Turret Syndrome

Christopher Kowalski’s home may not be his castle, but his guesthouse sure is. A three-bedroom castle complete with turrets, gargoyles, and rooftop battlements, the guesthouse stands about 50 yards away from the four-bedroom Tudor home where Kowalski and his wife, Grace, have lived since 1990...

Posted at 07:31 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 2009