List Price: $2,195,000
Sale Price: $1,900,000
The Property: The first modern-day foreclosure on tony East Lake Shore Drive is a three-bedroom condo with a large terrace in the Mayfair that sold November 17th. The eight-room condo, at 189 East Lake Shore Drive, has three full and one partial bathrooms, a recently renovated kitchen with premium-brand appliances and a large granite-topped island, and a 456-square-foot living room.

“The home was flooded with light from three exposures,” says Sophia Worden, the Prudential Rubloff agent who sold the 3,800-square-foot condo for the foreclosing lender. She described the master bedroom as “palatial.” The terrace, facing south toward Walton Street, is about 600 square feet. The home was in “pristine condition,” Worden says, “not your typical foreclosure that was neglected for a while.”

The condo had previously been listed conventionally, starting at $2.995 million in February 2009 and dropping to $2.25 million by March 2010. Worden put it on the market as a foreclosure in early October, and she says that she showed it to two dozen potential buyers in the first week and got three offers on it. The eventual buyers, whom she would not name (and who aren’t yet identified in public records), weren’t specifically shopping for a foreclosure, she says.

Buying at foreclosure prices is a “once-in-a-lifetime thing on that street,” Worden says. She believes it’s the first there since the advent of the foreclosure crisis, and I could not find any other in the public records. “In their wildest dreams, they didn’t anticipate finding this good a deal on East Lake Shore Drive,” she says.

While foreclosures have hit such exclusive areas as Lake Forest and Lincoln Park, the string of seven elite residential buildings east of the Drake Hotel has largely been protected. All the buildings there except the Mayfair and 219 East Lake Shore Drive are co-ops, and buyers have to put down at least 50 percent—and sometimes 100 percent—of the purchase price. Built in 1924 as the Lake Shore Drive Hotel, today’s building later became the Mayfair Regent Hotel—and the part-time home of Sir Georg Solti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—and was converted to condos in the mid-1990s.

Price Points: The sale price on this second-floor condo is 72 percent of the $2,622,500 that another buyer paid a month earlier for approximately the same floor plan five flights up. That seventh-floor condo, which was sold conventionally, does not have a terrace like this one, which suggests that this condo would be worth considerably more than $2.62 million on the conventional market. The ultimate sale price came to $577 per square foot, or 73 percent of the $788 per square foot it would have captured at its February 2009 asking price of $2.995 million.

Listing Agent: Sophia Worden of Prudential Rubloff; 312-504-8175 or sworden@rubloff.com