List Price: $1.375 million
Sale Price: $1.375 million
The Property: This 11-room Bannockburn home, which sold at foreclosure on September 30th, was rented for a year by Orlando Pace, the onetime offensive tackle for the Chicago Bears.

In early 2009, the house was standing unfinished and its investor-owner, who was asking $2.49 million for the place, was already in foreclosure. That’s when a deal was struck to hire a second builder to complete the home, says Allison Murphy, the @Properties agent who represented the house in the recent sale. That was done, she says, in order to bring Pace in as a tenant at $6,000 a month. The month after Pace’s one-year lease expired, the investor handed the property back to First Commercial Bank under a consent order of foreclosure, according to the Lake County Recorder of Deeds.

In 2006, the investor, whose identity is not clear in the Lake County records, bought the site for about $710,000 and demolished the older home on the 1.3-acre lot. The new house has six-plus bathrooms, six fireplaces, and two master suites (one on the first floor, another on the second), as well as four other bedrooms. It sits in a secluded wooded enclave near the Bannockburn School, which placed 15th in Lake County on Chicago’s recent ranking of local public elementary schools.

Pace, who spent 12 seasons with the St. Louis Rams and was released by the Bears last March, is no stranger to housing issues. According to various biographical citations, he owns several homes in a moderate neighborhood in his hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, which he rents to low-income families. I could not reach him for comment.

Price Points: The buyers, who are not yet identified in public records, “were very interested in foreclosures,” says Monica Childs, the @Properties agent who represented them. “With deals like that, I don’t know who isn’t right now.” This house’s peak asking price, in July 2007, was $2.749 million—about twice as much as Childs’s clients ended up paying for the place.

Listing Agent: Allison Murphy of @Properties; 847-343-4069