List Price: $1.699 million
Sale Price: $1.475 million
The Property: The rectilinear components of this Wicker Park façade look pieced together as in a jigsaw puzzle—an apt analogy for the home’s piecemeal financial history.
The pieces began to come together in early 2006, when a developer bought the site (still with an older home) for $525,000. A few months later, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, the developer took out a $2.38 million construction loan. According to Vivienne Frow—the @Properties agent who sold today’s property on February 12th—the developer used that loan to begin building today’s home and another one right around the corner. (In early 2007, the developer had paid $565,000 for the site of that second house, which is pictured below; Frow believes that there was a third site involved as well, but I can’t find records confirming that.)
In mid-2008, the lender, Community Bank of Lemont, hit both homes, still under construction, with foreclosure suits. Two years later, in the summer of 2010, both of them were sold in their unfinished state by US Bank, which had taken over the original lender’s assets. According to the recorder of deeds, the bank sold today’s home for $810,000 and the second home for $655,000. Different investors bought the two properties, Frow says, and they planned to finish both houses and resell them.
For today’s property, the investors installed a kitchen, four full bathrooms, and one partial bath; recaulked the exterior masonry; and put in lots of new flooring, as well as a radiant-heat system in the basement floor. “It was a three-page list of work,” says Frow, who had also represented the home for US Bank when the investors bought it last September. Among the features of the finished home are a kitchen with a silestone island and countertops and a mahogany backsplash; a hanging staircase; a very large master bathroom with an egg-shaped tub; and seven decks, including a rooftop deck with neighborhood and skyline views. The finishes, Frow says, are “contemporary, but with some earthiness so [the home] doesn’t have that starkness that [some] modern houses do.”
Frow would name neither the buyers—who have yet to appear in public records—nor the investors who flipped the house (they are identified at the recorder of deeds by an opaque corporate name).
Price Points: The house around the corner was sold in December for $1.6 million. While it was farther from being finished when US Bank sold the two properties—and thus went for less at that time—it is on a standard 25-by-125-foot city lot. Today’s property is on a 25-by-96-foot lot, so when finished and sold at regular market value, it went for less than the second property. Under the original developer, this home’s asking price had been $2.2 million. “That was when the market was crazy, but this [price] was even crazier,” Frow says.
Listing Agent: Vivienne Frow of @Properties; 312-952-4785