List Price: $1.8 million
Sale Price: $1.75 million
The Property: The ten-room Gold Coast condominium where Donald Rumsfeld lived for 15 years before moving to Washington, D.C., to become Secretary of Defense in 2001 has been resold by the family who bought the place from Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce. Set on the south end of the third and fourth floors of a handsome early 20th-century brick and limestone building that has just a dozen residences, this condo is one of four third-floor units that extend up into the old attic, which has a pitched roof and exposed trusses. As a result, while the condo’s main living rooms and three bedrooms have a very traditional layout. “When you walk upstairs, it has a totally different feel,” says Danny Glick, the @Properties agent who represented the latest sellers. “It has a killer media room up there in the lofted space.”

The building, at 1411 North State Street, is a Gold Coast classic, the kind of place where residents stay for decades. In fact, Glick says his seller, whom he declined to identify, had lived on another floor of the same building for several years before purchasing from the Rumsfelds. The Rumsfelds had bought the condo in 1986—for a price that is not clear in the public records—when he was between jobs. The year before, he had left the CEO post at G. D. Searle & Co., the Skokie pharmaceutical company whose sale to Monsanto Rumsfeld managed during his eight years there. In 1990, he would start a four-year stint as CEO of General Instrument Corp, whose headquarters he moved to Chicago.  

In March 2001, the couple sold the condo for $1,366,500. Two months earlier, President George W. Bush had tapped Rumsfeld to be his Secretary of Defense. It would be Rumsfeld’s second tour in the post; he had been President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977. Rumsfeld resigned as Bush’s Secretary of Defense in November 2006. He now reportedly lives in Maryland.

Glick listed the property for sale in late December and had a buyer lined up a month later. (The buyer is not identified in public records.) The sale closed a week ago, on February 25th.

Price Points: The new sale price is a 28 percent gain over what the sellers paid for the condo seven years ago. Glick says that while they were there, the sellers had redone one bathroom and tricked out the loft space with high-tech media. Otherwise, he says, “it was in beautiful condition.”

Listing Agent: Danny Glick of @Properties, (312) 491-0200; dannyglick@atproperties.com