So far in August, three homes have sold for precisely $1 million, and they all went on the market—for the first time, at least—in the spring of 2009. Here’s a closer look... Read more
A 16-room house on two and a half acres in Naperville sold in late May for $3.089 million. That’s the highest price paid for a home in that city since September 2008, when an estate on the same street sold for $4.95 million. At that time, this house was also for sale, with an asking price of $5.2 million. It remained on the market until it was finally sold this spring—at 59 percent of its original price... Read more
List Price: $2.39 million
The Property: Andy Bowyer, the president of the homebuilder Middlefork Capital, recalls setting out to build a new house a few doors south of Lake View’s Blaine Elementary School. “In my mind,” he says, “we were designing for a family...” Read more
Back when house prices were rising steadily, sellers could usually expect to cover an agent’s commission with the profit made on the home’s sale. But in today’s down market, with homeowners often selling a house for less than what they paid for it, that commission often comes out of the seller’s own pocket... Read more
List Price: $2.999 million 
Sale Price: $3.1 million 
The Property: This 11,000-square-foot house in Oak Brook’s Midwest Club nearly sold for about $4.2 million in 2008, but the deal fell apart, says the sellers’ agent, Jaime Adams... Read more
List Price: $3.295 million
The Property: When Robert and Emi Kelsey bought an old Tudor house in Winnetka ten years ago, it was sort of discombobulated. Some decades before, previous owners had sold off the property in front of the house and tacked an awkward entrance onto the back, and there were a couple of staircases but no main stairway... Read more
Demolition is well underway on the Gold Coast home where Frank Lloyd Wright lived briefly with a girlfriend (and future wife) while not yet divorced from his first wife. On Tuesday, the owner of the site told me that once the old residence is razed, construction will start on a four-story home designed “to look like it’s been there 100 years, to look correct for the neighborhood...” Read more
List Price: $2.25 million
Sale Price: $1.95 million
The Property: Robert Parrillo, a Chicago lawyer who was part of the investor team that in 2009 rescued the Chicago Sun-Times from bankruptcy, has sold a four-bedroom condo at the Park Newberry and is moving to the highest residential floor of the luxe Elysian... Read more
List Price: $549,000
The Property: You’ve heard the term “vanilla box” condos? Condos at the Carl Street Studios are more like tutti-frutti. Converted from a Victorian mansion into a complex of artists’ homes in the 1920s, Carl Street (which is actually on Burton Place) is unlike anything else in the city with its layers of eccentric artistry, unusual materials, and crazy-quilt colors... Read more