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Dennis Rodkin
Housing Bulletin: Giving Up the Ghosts
By Dennis Rodkin
Together, the many empty, unsold builder houses sprinkled around Chicago and the suburbs constitute a kind of scattered-site ghost town. But in the past few weeks, there have been signs of life—in the form of short sales and huge preforeclosure price cuts that have put living families into some of those homes, and that may do the same for many more in the near future... Read more
Sale of the Week: Blending Old and New in Old Town
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $2.975 million
Sale Price: $2.81 million
The Property: Although this 5,700-square-foot home was built in Chicago’s Old Town in 2005, its brick and limestone construction, its slender, arched windows, and its flat façade make it appear much older. But if the attached two-car garage doesn’t give away its true age, a look inside at the elevator... Read more
On the Market: Two Houses, One Home in Old Town
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $4,239,000
The Property: Fifteen years ago, Tom Melk and Sarah Potter paid $500,000 for two dilapidated wood frame houses from 1874. “They were basically leaning on each other to stand up,” Potter remembers. Over the course of ten years, the couple created a distinctive new home by building a glass bridge between the two houses and completely reworking the interiors in a 1930s Modernist style with white plaster walls, crazy-quilt... Read more
Housing Bulletin: Coming Out on Top in the Loop
By Dennis Rodkin
Last week, the first four buyers closed on their condos in one of the city’s most improbable building conversions, the top ten floors of the slab-like, 50-story 55 E. Monroe office building, which has been transformed into a residential block called Park Monroe... Read more
Sale of the Week: Lordly Georgian in Inverness
By Dennis Rodkin
Sale Price: $1.65 million
The Property: This commanding 16-room Georgian mansion looks down from its hilltop site through a broad allée of 26 tall silver maple trees. The home was built in 1972 at the center of the McIntosh section of the village of Inverness from a design by Adolph Nilsson, whose company, Period Homes, built several impressive houses in this and... Read more
On the Market: Price Cut Enhances Lincoln Park Condo
By Dennis Rodkin
List Price: $2,995,000
The Property: This desirable four-bedroom Lincoln Park condo became even more attractive after its sellers cut their asking price by 25 percent. It’s one of eight units in a concrete and glass building that was designed by Pappageorge Haymes and developed by the Belgravia Group. The building stands on a low-traffic cul-de-sac just a block west of the Francis Parker School... Read more
Don’t Fence Me In
By Dennis Rodkin
Rules regarding renovations may inhibit the sale of an eccentric house built by a real Texas Maverick Read more
Housing Bulletin: It Takes a Village
By Dennis Rodkin

When checking out the highest-priced home sales in the Chicago area, the two suburbs where I most often wind up are Lake Forest and Winnetka. While other towns (Hinsdale, Kenilworth, Glencoe) have lots of high-end sales, these two towns are perennially near the top of Chicago’s rankings for the number of sales at a million dollars or more (usually behind Chicago’s Gold Coast and... Read more