By Dennis Rodkin
Would-be homeowners are discovering the silver lining behind the falling prices in the local real-estate market. Here are six housing bargains snapped up by lucky or savvy buyers so far this year Read more
Dennis Rodkin
List price: $975,000
The Property: While searching for a home, Zbigniew and Beata Banas became accidental developers. They found a property they liked—a shuttered church in the Irving Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side—but the building, a simple peaked structure with a spire piercing its roof, proved far too large for just one...
The latest reports show that the tide of foreclosures keeps rising. Last week, Realty Trac reported that one of every 538 mortgaged homes in Illinois is in some stage of foreclosure. (In the Chicago metropolitan area, Kane County had the highest concentration—1 in 415 mortgages—and DuPage County had the lowest: 1 in 734.) The week before, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that 2.5 percent of all mortgages were...
List Price: $3.3 million
Sale Price: $2.93 million
The Property: When this 57th-floor penthouse atop The Heritage at Millennium Park first went on the market in July 2007, the sellers were asking $4.4 million. By the time they sold the 4,668-square-foot space with north, east, and west views, they had cut the asking price to $350,000 less than ...
List Price: $2.45 million
The Property: One of a pair of limestone homes built in the early 1880s, this nine-room, three-story Gold Coast house has a stately charm inside, from the columns that frame the open dining room to the Second Empire mantelpiece in the living room. Original details—such as the hefty wood front door and...
In Highland Park, where the average home sale price is $769,000, there is a development of ten townhouses being built right now with price tags ranging from $165,000 to $239,000. The complex, which will also have four rental apartments and several important green features, is a good example of what can happen when a municipal government throws its ...
List Price: $1.550 million (house on left/south) $ 1.500 million (house on right/north)
The Property: This pair of new houses has many sustainable features: solar panels, recycled roofing, paints and carpeting that emit little or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). They even feature permeable paving in the front sidewalks so that storm water can...