List Price: $3.66 million
Sale Price: $3.66 million
The Property: A new mansion will soon start going up on the 1900 block of Burling Street, midway between the house with the giant blue sculpture and the so-called Parrillo Palace.
On March 19, BGD&C, a builder of high-end homes, sold a lot that is 60 feet wide and the city-standard 125 feet deep to a client for $3.66 million, a first step in building the client’s house on the site. (The client hasn’t been identified in public records.) Charles Grode, a BDG&C partner, says that zoning would allow a 17,000-square-foot home on the lot, but that “the people we’re building for are putting up half that and [will have] more yard.” He would not say what the cost of construction would be.
Brian Goldberg, a principal with LG Construction + Development, a competing luxury builder, says that homes of that caliber can cost $700 to $800 per square foot to build, depending on the features and finishes. At $700, construction of an 8,500-square-foot house would cost $5.95 million. If true, that would make the owner’s total investment in the property at least $9.6 million when the house is finished.
Two vintage apartment buildings occupy the site now; BDG&C kept the units rented since buying the two separate lots, Grode says. He would not discuss a construction start date or what style of house the clients have in mind.
After a pause in recent years, there’s been increased activity in the mansion-choked area of Lincoln Park west of Halsted Street around Armitage Avenue. (A few years ago, a reader suggested I call the area WHOA Baby, because so many eye-popping homes have gone up in the blocks of Willow, Howe, Orchard, Armitage, and Burling.) In November, Goldberg’s company bought four townhouses and planned to replace them with a single megamansion. Two new-construction homes in the area sold for over $4 million each at the end of February.
“The market has been picking up,” Grode says. “There are people who have been sitting on their money for a while because everything was uncertain. One reason people are coming out now is that it’s been several years of uncertainty, and the next several years will probably be more of the same. But they [believe] that we’re at least past the nadir.”
Price Points: Grode would not discus what his company paid for the land or other specifics about it. “We bought it in two pieces over several years,” he says, “and held it until we had a buyer who wants to build.” Files at the Cook County Recorder of Deeds show that BGD&C bought the lot at 1950 North Burling for $1.2 million in 2004. A limited liability company purchased the lot next door (1948 North Burling) in May 2010 for $1.35 million. This appears to indicate that the builders paid a total of $2.55 million for the land that they then sold, on March 19, for $3.66 million. During the boom years of the mid-2000s, Grode says, the land “would have gone for $4 million or more.”
Listing Agent: None