[1] LINCOLN PARK
LIST $8.5 MILLION SALE $8.5 MILLION

» Joe Nicholas, a Chicago hedge fund executive, paid the full $8.5 million asking price for this six-year-old 11,000-square-foot Lincoln Park house last August. According to Midwest Real Estate Data, it was the highest-priced home sale in Chicago since March 2007, when two city homes were sold for $8.5 million and $11 million. There has been no more expensive sale in the suburbs since July 2008, when two homes were sold there for about $9 million each.

Nicholas is the head of Hedge Fund Research and the author of several books about investing. He did not respond to a request for comment, but his agent, Jay Michael of Estate Property, maintains that the house was well priced. “To be built new today, that house would cost $12 million,” he says. Set on a double lot (50 feet wide), it has six bedrooms and five-plus baths. The basement has a theatre and a gym; a greenhouse, a basketball half court, and a walled patio area sit atop the house.

The sellers, Michael Friedman and Margaret Berger, bought the lot in 2001 for $1.995 million, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, and they had the house custom-built in 2004. Their selling agent, Janet Owen of Sudler Sotheby’s, would not say how much they spent to build the house. I could not reach the Friedmans for comment.

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

Photograph: Todd Urban