List Price: $1 million
Sale Price: $1,106,506

The Property: By combining two corner-unit condos into one 4,000-square-foot layout, a pair of senior citizens looking for a low-maintenance home created what is now far and away the highest-priced home in Wheeling. Gloria and Donald Cooper sold their house of 20 years in Riverwoods this year. “We’re too old to worry about the gardening and the lawn and the upkeep,” says Gloria, who is 74. (Her husband is 82.) But they had no interest in downsizing, so they shopped for something around the size of their house. They ended up buying two unfinished units in a new condo development and finishing them off as a single three-bedroom condo with a 600-square-foot living room, three balconies, and four indoor parking spaces. It’s a little bigger than their former home, Gloria says. The finishes and other details the Coopers specified took the total sale price up from the asking price of $1 million to $1,106,506.

The Coopers now live in the third completed building at Prairie Park at Wheeling; the 17-acre development will eventually include five five-story buildings grouped around a large pond. (The development also has a 300-foot-tall waterfall at its entrance, which the developers say is the largest artificial waterfall in Illinois.)  Prairie Park comprises one part of the ongoing building binge at the north end of Wheeling-near the intersection of Milwaukee Avenue and Lake-Cook Road-that includes the new Westin North Shore hotel and several new restaurants.

Price Points: At $1.1 million, the price tag on the Coopers’ new home not only eclipses the highest price on record for a single-family home in Wheeling ($725,000, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois), but is twice as much as the next highest price paid for a unit sold at Prairie Park: $501,276. (Asking prices for remaining units at Prairie Park now go as high as $625,000.) “They will be building bigger and more expensive things near us in a few years,” says Gloria Cooper. “Buying three lots and tearing them all down to put up one big house-I saw it happen in Riverwoods.”

Buyers: Donald and Gloria Cooper

Sales Agent: Matthew Doetsch, Real Estate Doetsch, (847) 541-6880