Two recent reports from expert analysts of the Chicago housing scene shed new light on the impact of the recent troubles affecting the local residential real-estate market. One report shows that renters of high-end apartments are benefiting from the downtown condo glut, while the other indicates that the foreclosure wave is sweeping into Latino neighborhoods after initially hitting African American neighborhoods hardest...

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Downtown developers aren’t the only ones troubled by a drastic downturn in condo sales.
Many suburban developers are also struggling to unload condo inventory. In Lombard (at 310 South Main Street), one developer is offering 18 condos at auction later this month—and the terms of the auction suggest a handful of buyers could walk away with bargain-basement...

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October was another gloomy month for the downtown condo market, with developers hitting the brakes on both the Spire and the 76-story condo tower by Architectonica that was planned for Lakeshore East.
But October was also the month when deals closed on two very expensive penthouses at the Metropolitan Tower, the building with the blue...

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Despite the downturn in the housing market, there are still people shopping for homes these days. Here are four new or newly upgraded house-hunting tools to assist them.

• Prudential Preferred Properties provides subscribers with a weekly Preferred Market Watch Report with detailed stats on all properties listed for sale in a particular zip code. (You can sign up for the report here.) The reports include, among other things, the average...

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Recently, several government and philanthropic agencies have rolled out new programs to help the growing number of Chicago-area homeowners facing foreclosure. Last week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that it will provide $68 million in grants and low-interest loans to help people on the edge of foreclosure. And in mid-September...

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Last week, a local builder, Paul Ahlrich of Grun Development, sat down with me for a frank talk about his experience building and selling new houses in Chicago. Ahlrich got into the business slowly at first, and then in early 2006, took a headlong plunge, building three new upscale houses in Humboldt Park—houses he expected to sell before or shortly after...

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In the present economic climate, home sellers have been tense, while potential homebuyers have had a tendency to sit still. But for ten days, beginning on October 10th, one real-estate company will try to get house sales moving again by cutting the asking price on thousands of homes by 10 percent.

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage has arranged for the owners of about 23,000 homes nationwide—about 1,300 of them in...

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As evidenced by Chicago’s annual real-estate chart—which appears in the October 2008 issue and spans the 12-month period from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2008—home values are down almost everywhere in the metro region. (And according to a Case-Schiller report that came...

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In its October 2008 issue, Chicago presents its annual residential real-estate chart, which, among other things, reveals how many homes were sold this past year in nearly 300 city neighborhoods and suburbs. There wasn’t space to show how those sale numbers compared to last year, but in the ongoing housing meltdown, the huge decline in...

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Back in the summer of 2006, a subdivision called Settlers Ridge was the hottest thing in Sugar Grove, a small town west of Aurora in Kane County. The homebuilder Kimball Hill had begun work on what was intended to become a model of...

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