List Price: $1.549 million
Sale Price: $1.537 million
The Property: An 11,600-square-foot mansion on Woodley Road outside Winnetka has the dubious distinction of being the first foreclosure sale in that enclave of prominent families, high-level executives, and other eminent people.

The home, built in 2001, sold in March for less than the foreclosed homeowners had spent a dozen years earlier for the lot, which is a little under an acre. According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, they paid $1.6 million for the site in April 2000. It’s hard to estimate how much they spent to build the house. “There were gold-plated fixtures in a lot of the bathrooms,” says Rising Realty’s Menash Zadik, the agent who sold the property for the lender. “When you walked through that house, it looked like somebody had said to their designer, ‘Just run with it, do anything.’”

The house has an art gallery, six fireplaces, two custom-designed kitchens, and six full and three partial baths. Photos that accompanied the listing show checkerboard marble floors in the very long main hallway and another patterned floor that seems to mix marble, wood, and more marble in a sort of diagonal quilt pattern. They back up Zadik’s contention that “the décor was the biggest obstacle to getting [the house] sold.”

The homeowners took out a $2 million mortgage in 2006, records show, and in September 2009 the lender began foreclosure proceedings. The bank took back the house in March 2011, and the next month Rising Realty put it on the market, priced at $2,999,900. In early December the price was cut to $1.549 million. “The buyers came out of the woodwork,” Zadik says. By the end of that month the house was under contract; the sale closed March 20.

Price Points: Dividing the home’s square footage by the price, Zadik notes that the buyer paid about $128 a square foot. “You couldn’t build it for that, even if somebody gave you the acre of land for free,” he says. “That was a great deal for the buyer”—especially when you consider that the seller of this nearby home is asking $775 a square foot.

Listing Agent: Menash Zadik of Rising Realty; 773-897-0613 or menash@risingrealty.com.