Sale Price: $275,000
The tippy top of Rogers Park (and the city) holds a special treat for lovers of lake. It’s called Eastlake Terrace and it runs for three blocks fronting park and beach. Unlike the many stubby, bucolic blocks east of Sheridan Road that dead-end at the lake, Eastlake runs north-south and is dominated by low-rise multi-family. My sale of the week hails from this coveted street, in a 1926 six-flat.
Despite an aching need for renovations and upgrades, the 2,400-sqaure-foot four-bedroom condo with two full and one half baths sold to the first person to view it for a hair below asking price—$275,000. A boon to all parties is that the buyer is an architect who will almost certainly do as the listing instructs and perform a gut rehab on the kitchen while treating the space as a “designer’s dream.”
Beyond kitchen work, the buyer has inherited plaster and hardwood in need of refinishing. But large rooms, extra-wide doorways, millwork, a wood-burning fireplace, and front and rear sun rooms are the sorts of spoils you find in Rogers Park properties for considerably less than in neighboring Edgewater.
Rogers Beach Park and Juneway Terrace Park are opposite the condo and have tennis courts and two beaches. This unit surveys it all. Also, the Evanston city line is three blocks north, where just beyond Calvary Cemetery the public lakefront and bike path continue to Northwestern University.
The lakefront sliver of Rogers Park, east of Sheridan Road, has always stood apart from the inland portion, in both grandiosity and amenity. New investment from billionaire Col. J.N. Pritzker and Tawani Enterprises is bringing citywide attention. Pritzker gut rehabbed a 1928 apartment building with 84 units and went to town on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House—though another stately house nearby, the former Shambhala Center, was razed to make way for a parking garage.
Price Points: The sellers listed the home “as-is” in July for $279,000 and barely had to budge on price. The sale price breaks down to $115 a square foot, almost exactly the neighborhood-wide condo average. The pick of the litter sold last September for $258,000. It’s a floor higher with the exact same footprint and assessments ($625 a month), and in somewhat better condition. A much smaller two-bed in a neighboring Eastlake building fetched $283,750 in August. That should settle the question of value.
“I had a bunch of calls from people wanting to get in for a viewing right after we went under contract,” says Coldwell Banker listing agent Sharon Kozak, a longtime Rogers Parker. “I had to tell them they were a day late.”