List Price: $2.399 million
List Price: $2.399 million
Sale Price: $2.25 million
The Property: So far in its short life, this 14-room house, built in 2002, has been sold four times, most recently on August 11th. Those sellers had owned the place for just 11 months.
With its steep roof, window bay, and huge wraparound porch, the house looks like a well-kept old-timer. In fact, it’s a 21st-century residence designed to fit in among the older frame houses in a part of Chicago’s North Center neighborhood known as Southeast Ravenswood. (The area is bounded on the north and south by Irving Park Road and Montrose Avenue, and on the east and west by Ashland Avenue and the CTA Brown Line tracks.) The rear of the house has a three-story copper bay that has a far more contemporary look.
The house’s developers took advantage of a zoning quirk by incorporating some of the lot’s original house into this new one, allowing them to keep its north wall butted up against the neighboring apartment building. (A new home would have had to be farther from the north lot line.) The result is that the porch runs all along the house’s south side, and overlooks a spacious side yard.
“That’s the kind of space you usually only get in the suburbs,” says Marlene Granacki, the RE/Max agent who has sold this house four times—and sold the former house on the lot to the developers who built this one. The latest sellers, Erich and Jennifer Tengelsen, bought the house in August 2007 for $2.375 million. He is an executive with Chicago Trading Company, and she runs an events planning company. They listed it for sale with an asking price of $2.475 million in February 2008, when Erich was transferred to New York, Granacki says.
Price Points: Here’s the whole recent price history:
• In 1999, a pair of developers bought the lot and its former house for $355,000.
• The developers sold the new house and lot for $1.8 million in November 2002.
• In March 2003, the house’s first owners sold the place for $1.905 million. (Like the latest sellers, they sold because of a job transfer.)
• In August 2007, the Tengelsens paid $2.375 million for the house.
• On August 11th, buyers who are not yet identified in the public records paid $2.25 million for the house.