When Zillow announced last week that Chicago is the country’s number one market for homebuyers, I snarkily replied on Twitter that, by the same token, Chicago is the number one place where sellers are taking it in the shorts. Two reports out that same week backed me up... Read more
One of the quirkiest houses on the North Shore—with light fixtures carved from wooden salad bowls, a Western-themed mural above the living room, and a distinctly offbeat fence—came back on the market this month, five years after it went up for sale for the first time since it was built more than 90 years ago... Read more
Part of a distressed sale—a foreclosure or a short sale—or a loan modification entails the mortgage lender forgiving some or all of a homeowner’s debt. Formerly, tax laws counted that forgiven amount as taxable income. But in 2007, President George W. Bush signed legislation that temporarily exempted forgiven mortgage debt from taxable income. That law expires December 31—unless Congress acts to extend it... Read more
Apartment rents have been rising and will keep going up for the near future—but at three different rates in three different strata of the market, according to speakers at last week’s Lincoln Park Builders Real Estate Forum ’12. In the fourth and bottom layer, they will remain flat... Read more
One of the most controversial pieces of Kenwood property, the vacant lot next door to the house of President Barack Obama, went up for sale today. The sellers are asking $899,000. That’s 33 percent more than they paid for the 50-by-150-foot lot in March 2008, before Obama’s election presumably jacked up the value of properties near his... Read more
In July 1962, Dr. Theresa Southgate had the then-eccentric idea that she ought to live within walking distance of her new job at JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, headquartered at Dearborn and Grand. “It was an awful neighborhood then, [with] nowhere to live,” Southgate recalls. But there was one big apartment project under construction four blocks south of the office, so she signed a lease... Read more
A little over a year ago, almost ten percent of the 2,100 public-housing units owned by the Housing Authority of Cook County had stood empty for two years or more. That meant the county was failing to house about 200 needy households, even though it had spaces for them. But after an aggressive round of rehab—and a shakeup of the agency—those 200 units have been put back in use... Read more