With foreclosures still proliferating in and around Chicago, sharp buyers can spot some great bargains. If the property is damaged, though, most mortgage lenders won’t finance the purchase. That’s why some buyers are now turning to a specialized loan called a 203K, based on the future value of the house, post-repairs... Read more
List Price: $1,349,900
Sale Price: $1,025,000
The Property: This 14-room Georgian home on four acres in Bannockburn was sold on December 10th for precisely the same amount it fetched ten years earlier... Read more
List Price: $3.2 million
The Property: In the early 1990s, the psychologist Chuck Anderson and his wife, Dale Carol Anderson, an interior designer, commissioned this classically styled home for a large, triangular residential lot on what was then the western frontier of Lincoln Park—just east of the formerly industrial Clybourn Avenue. Their architect, Pappageorge Haymes, put the house on one half of the site and a walled garden on the other, with a pillared outdoor rotunda connecting the two... Read more
After two years of trying, Chicago’s affordable-housing activists may be just a month away from tapping into the city’s supposedly vast Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds. Depending on the outcome of work that’s going on now to bridge the gap between two competing ordinances, this could mean between about $50 million to $100 million a year that would go toward buying up foreclosures and rehabbing them into affordable living units... Read more
List Price: $560,000
The Property: Viewed from the street, this mid-century modern home nestled into a waterfront site on the Chain O’ Lakes barely makes a visual ripple. That’s because it’s entirely oriented in the other direction: the wide expanse of glass at the back off the house provides views of a broad sweep of lawn leading down to Meyers Bay, which rolls out to Pistakee Lake. Read more