OLD TOWN
LIST PRICE: $3.15 million
SALE PRICE: $2.75 million

About 130 years old, this mansard-roofed limestone house (right) on North LaSalle Drive is one of two neighboring homes that the developer Roger Luri bought for a combined $2.35 million in 2004. At the time, each of the homes contained four apartments, but Luri’s company, Metro Home Chicago, restored and expanded the houses, taking them back to their single-residence origins. “Everything [is] new from the ground up, except the façade and the sides,” he says.

Following the renovation, Luri hoped to sell the two houses for a combined $9.8 million; instead, he ended up unloading both homes as short sales (where a property is sold, with the lending bank’s approval, for less money than what is owed on the property). “When you do this for a living, you do the best you can do when the market changes,” Luri says. “You sell them for the best you can.”

Luri had initially priced this house at $4.65 million; the December sale price of $2.75 million was 59 percent of that. The buyers are not yet identified in public records. The adjacent home, which is slightly larger, sold in September for $3.2 million, or 62 percent of its original price of $5.15 million. The buyer of that home, Alexander Lurye, an executive at Citadel Investment Group, could not be reached for comment.

Send tips about home sales to dennis@rodkin.com.

Photograph: Todd Urban