In most of the Chicago area, the number of home sales is down about 30 to 40 percent this year, according to MRED, the real-estate data service. In the Round Lake section of Lake County, it’s down 77.9 percent. That means only a little more than one-fifth as many houses have sold there in the past 12 months as did in the prior year. And some agents in town say...

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List Price: $1.4 million
Sale Price: $1.3 million
The Property: This two-bedroom condo on the 44th floor of the prestigious Park Tower at 800 N. Michigan Ave. was the “in-town” second home of a pair of Indiana physicians for seven years, until they traded up this year to a...

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List Price: $1,099,000
The Property: Unlike ostentatious new houses that flaunt their thousands of square feet with soaring roofs and phallic turrets, this Cape Cod–style house in Wilmette is a classic 1950s exercise in self-restraint, with a taupe exterior and a sheltered porch. The broad, low-hanging roof suggests a modest house huddles beneath, but, in fact, there are...

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The Properties: July started off with a bang on the North Shore, and that’s not a reference to the many fireworks displays hosted by towns and country clubs. Two separate lakefront mansions sold for stratospheric prices: on July 1st, a Kenilworth estate went for $9,710,913, and two days later, one in Wilmette went for...

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List Price: $1.495 million
The Property: Nine years ago, this redstone townhouse from the early 1890s and its neighbor to the east were coupled together in an unusual approach to expandable housing. In 1999, when their family of five was outgrowing the house on the east (where they had lived since 1980), Susan and Tom Kuczmarski bought this house to...

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List Price: $4.9 million
The Property: You will be forgiven if, when approaching this new house in Hinsdale, you wonder whether they hauled it over from England in pieces or already assembled. The rough-hewn stone façade, the sheltered entry vestibule with timber beams and...

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