Photograph: Courtesy of Redfin
 

A year and a half after he put it on the market, former Chicago Cub Carlos Zambrano’s six-bedroom, five-bath River Forest home sold Monday for $675,000, which is 56 percent of what he had paid for it seven years earlier.

Now a free agent, Zambrano pitched for the Cubs from 2001 to 2011. He bought the River Forest house for $1.19 million in July 2006, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. The house was built in 1999 on a pretty block that is in a sort of peninsula neighborhood with forest preserve surrounding it on three sides.

Photos that accompanied the listing show a large kitchen and a sizable loft space.

Only a year and a half after buying in River Forest, Zambrano bought again, this time much closer to Wrigley Field. In January 2008, I reported that he had paid $2.66 million for another six-bedroom house, in a part of Lakeview that at the time was re-developing as residential from its former iteration as an industrial area. That house is 6,700 square feet.

He didn’t put the River Forest house on the market until August 2011. At that time, he was already asking for a loss, listing the home for $969,000, or 80 percent of what he had paid.

The Cubs traded Zambrano to the Miami Marlins in January 2012. Later that year, he put the Lakeview home on the market asking $2.395 million—a 10 percent loss—but took it back off the market at the end of the year.

The River Forest property came down in price several times and changed agents twice. It wasn’t actively listed from September 2012 until December, when Jessica Rivera of Weichert Realtors/Nickel Group got the listing and cut the asking price to $829,000. The ultimate selling price took 19 percent off even that deeply reduced ask.

Rivera has not responded to a request for comment. The buyers are not yet identified in public records of the sale.