12/27/07

This Week on Spike—December 27

A nice two-year-old house in northwest Elmhurst, this one sold in early December for $865,000, which is 5.9 percent below what the sellers paid in September 05.

The 2007 sale price was approximately the 2004 value (approximate because this house did not exist then; it's a replacement of a modest ranch). That is what some real estate appraisers are now saying is appropriate--prices from three years ago. As recently as September, appraisers were telling me they were using 2005 prices.

The asking price was $924,900...

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12/20/07

On the Market—A New Home in Lake View’s Instant Neighborhood

List Price: $2,275,000

The Property: Situated in a neighborhood of new, high-end homes on a parcel of land in Lake View that was, until six years ago, entirely industrial, this 11-room house has a clean-cut limestone façade, bamboo floors, steel and glass stair rails, and a super-sleek kitchen. But what really grabs the eye is the solid-core wood doors faced with a vertical-striped zebrawood veneer that are used throughout the house, providing a dark accent to an otherwise light interior.

The house has five outdoor decks on four levels, including a spacious party deck atop the garage and two more private decks on opposite sides of a third-floor den with outdoor stairs up to the rooftop. Glass walls extending out to the decks and lots of...

Posted at 10:00 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/19/07

Housing Bulletin—Who’s to Blame for the Subprime Mortgage Mess?

Sometime last spring, when the present subprime mortgage crisis was on hardly anyone's radar screen, one blip showed up at the office of Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general.

Some attorneys who work in Madigan’s consumer protection division had spotted newspaper ads for mortgages that seemed too good to be true—a suspicion confirmed by the attorneys’ subsequent investigation.

One ad in the Sun-Times offered a $250,000 loan for a payment of $656 a month—but made no mention that the only way to get that deal was to take out what’s called a Payment Option Adjustable Rate Mortgage...

Posted at 10:58 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (6)

12/17/07

Sale of the Week—Chicago’s Gold Coast

List Price: $5,150,000
Sale Price: $4,850,000

The Property: Although 12 years old, this brick home on the Gold Coast still gets called “new construction” by its selling agent, because it is the rare single-family home in the neighborhood that is from any later than World War I. Its exterior was designed to resemble the old-timers, but inside, “you know what’s behind the walls; the plumbing and electrical is all up to date,” says Janet Owen, the agent who represented the sellers in the sale that closed December 3rd. On top of that, because of the extra-deep lot—150 feet compared to the neighborhood’s more typical 100 feet—there is sufficient space for

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12/13/07

On the Market—Crown Penthouse at Chicago’s Olympia Centre

List Price: $4.3 million
The Property: This two-story penthouse with views of the lake and the city to the north, east, and south is a complete period piece from the late 1980s. The glittery aesthetic of the era shows through in everything from the sleek round-edged cabinetry painted with gleaming auto-body paint to the spiral staircase surrounded with mirrored glass panels and steel supports painted mauve.

The penthouse has an indoor pond, numerous built-in banquettes and tables, shelves of multicolored granite, a tanning bed, and an underlit glass catwalk to the master bedroom...

Posted at 10:20 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/12/07

Housing Bulletin—Where the Foreclosures Are

Do you know someone who has recently lost or is about to lose his house in a foreclosure? If you don’t, you may very soon—and that’s true whether you’re rich, poor, or somewhere in the middle. The latest and most precise figures show that foreclosures are on the rise everywhere in the Chicago area, including such affluent places as Glencoe, Lake Forest, Hinsdale, and Lincoln Park.

Last week, the National Training and Information Center released figures compiled by Record Information Services (RIS), a data-gathering company based in far western Kane County. The figures compare the number of new foreclosures in the first half of 2006 with the same period in 2007. They are broken out for 77 individual...

Posted at 07:35 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/10/07

Sale of the Week—Glen Ellyn

List Price: $1,375,000
Sale Price: $1,252,500

The Property: This wide 13-room house on a hilly Glen Ellyn street sold on December 5th as part of an innovative house-swap deal. In order to offload this residence, its builders bought the house that their buyers were leaving to move here.

Like many homebuilders these days, Glanville-Koshul Homes was sitting on unsold inventory...

Posted at 05:21 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/06/07

New on the Market—Lake Forest

List Price: $8,595,000

The Property: In 1977, Ronald and Carole DeBruin bought three lakefront acres in Lake Forest that had once been part of Villa Turicum, the 269-acre estate of Harold and Edith McCormick, both children of enormously wealthy fathers. (Harold was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper that was the foundation of International Harvester; Edith, the original benefactor of Brookfield Zoo, had John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, for a father.) The DeBruins built this elegant 13-room house, which has five bedrooms, a 52-foot-wide entry hall, and a family room that opens onto a bluestone terrace and oversized hot tub. But the real attraction may be...

Posted at 05:42 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/05/07

Housing Bulletin—X/O, Lakeshore Athletic Club, and Two Former Blog Homes

The fates of two controversial Chicago real-estate projects were decided over the past week—and both decisions involved freshmen aldermen. The first bit of news concerned X/O, the pair of sinuous towers, designed by Lucien Lagrange, slated to go up in the South Loop at 18th Street and Prairie Avenue. Reacting to residents’ fears that the tall buildings would overwhelm the landmark Glessner House and other historic residences nearby, Robert Fioretti, the newly elected alderman of the 2nd Ward, had proposed an ordinance that would have cut the site’s allowable building height in half, from 450 to 225 feet. Fioretti’s proposal would have essentially repealed the Planned Development Ordinance for the property that the Chicago City Council had approved in October 2006, before Fioretti was elected.

But then came the report late last week that Fioretti had withdrawn his ordinance, thus giving the $300-million project the green light. According to Keith Giles, who is developing X/O with his partner...

Posted at 09:28 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/03/07

Sale of the Week—Joseph Cari’s Lincoln Park home

List Price: $3.45 million
Sale Price: $3 million

The Property: Though it looks like two townhouses of different vintages, this is actually a single Lincoln Park residence, its two sides built decades apart. From 1999 until October 2007, the 12-room house belonged to Joseph Cari Jr., a once-prominent Democratic fundraiser. In 2005, Cari was indicted on federal charges related to a complex series of board appointments and campaign-fund donations—a tangled web unraveled by Chicago’s Steve Rhodes in...

Posted at 04:51 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)