List Price: $999,000
Sale Price: $1 million
The Property: The agent who sold this foreclosed 12-room house in a very desirable east neighborhood in Glenview thinks that the sale helped nudge the town’s real-estate market upward a smidge, rather than hurt nearby sellers, as many foreclosures have been shown to do.
Today’s house went on the market in August. In the six months prior to that, says Mike Olszewski—the Area Wide Realty foreclosure specialist who sold the property—the average sale price on five-bedroom Glenview homes fell to $890,000, a 1 percent drop.
When today’s house went up for sale, there were 70 to 75 five-bedroom homes on the market in the suburb. By selling at $1 million—or 12 percent above the market’s recent average—the listing “helped the values for everyone in that [pool] of homes in Glenview,” Olszewski suggests.
According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, the builder of the house bought the site (which at the time contained an older home) in 2005 for $600,000 and took out a $2.05 million mortgage. That mortgage was later paid off, and the builder took out a $3 million mortgage in 2007. In 2009, US Bank began foreclosure proceedings on the completed but unsold home.
The house has a bridal staircase, a two-story family room with a mahogany-paneled fireplace, ten-foot ceilings in the basement, and a three-car garage, according to the information that Olszewski published after listing the home for Select Portfolio Servicing, which handled the sale for the foreclosing lender. “It was in really good condition,” Olszewski says. “We cleaned the inside, did some landscaping, and fixed some light fixtures.”
Multiple buyers bid on the home—Olszewski will not say how many—and it ultimately went to a buyer who offered $1,000 more than the asking price. The buyer is not yet identified in public records of the sale, which closed October 25.
Price Points: Anne Dubray, a Coldwell Banker agent, has a conventional listing on the same block as today’s property. What’s more, one of her colleagues represented a bidder on Olszewski’s listing. She doesn’t think that sale helped other sellers. “What you’re really affecting is the people whose houses were built [around the same time as the Olszewski listing] and have paid their bills this whole time and now would be getting $1.3 million or $1.4 million for their homes”—that is, she says, if they weren’t competing against priced-to-move foreclosures. “Foreclosures are part of the market,” she acknowledges, “and you have to compete with them. It’s tough on sellers.” Her listing down the block, now under contract, was not competing against Olszewski’s, she adds, because it’s smaller—it has four bedrooms and a small basement—and a “more classic” style inside and out.
Listing Agent: Michael Olszewski of Area Wide Realty; 708-656-3333 or info@areawide.com