List Price: $2.3 million
Sale Price: $2.3 million
The Property: This newly built 15-room house scored the record price for a residence in East Ravenswood, the Chicago neighborhood that is home to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The house, two blocks south of Emanuel’s house, is the third on its block built by the developer Christopher Olson.

“When I first got to that block, it was very different, with vacant lots and a lot of houses [ready to be] torn down,” Olson says. With the neighborhood’s large lots—today’s property is 38.5 feet by 165 feet, compared to the city standard of 25 by 125— Olson says that he is able to build the big houses some affluent city families want while still providing roomy backyards. His first house on the block went for $1.8 million in 2009, and the next, completed in 2010, went for $2.058 million. Today’s house, bought before it was completed and customized for the buyers, stepped it up another notch, to $2.3 million. (His company, Olson Development, partnered with Vertex Properties on the project.) Olson is building a fourth house four blocks north on the same street.

The approximately 6,600-square-foot house has six bedrooms, four full and two partial baths, and a three-car garage. It is, Olson says, largely a copy of the floor plan in the house he completed across the street in 2010, but “with everything a little bigger, because we had room for it.” Though the exterior has a traditional look with a big front porch, pillars, and a brick façade, Olson says that the interior looks more modern. There were no interior photos posted with the listing, and Olson wouldn’t share any pictures because he said that his clients had requested privacy. Their names have not yet appeared in public records.

Price Points: Olson’s company paid $775,000 for the lot for this home in 2007, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Though the $2.3 million sale price is the highest recorded for the neighborhood, Olson notes that there are bigger and pricier residences on the horizon. “Custom homes [in East Ravenswood and nearby Graceland West] have been built [that] are larger and more expensive than ours,” he says, “but they haven’t been listed for sale yet.”

Listing Agent: Christopher Olson of Prudential Rubloff; 312-368-5300 or colson@rubloff.com