08/18/08

Sale of the Week—A Robin’s Nest on Lake Shore Drive

List Price: $3.199 million
Sale Price: $2.75 million
The Property: In the late 1960s, when the construction executive Albert Robin developed The Carlyle, the 40-story condo building at 1040 North Lake Shore Drive, he set aside a two-story aerie for himself and his family. Robin—a benefactor of Roosevelt University, which named its Schaumburg campus after him—died in...

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08/14/08

On the Market—A West Loop Loft

List Price: $560,000
The Property: This two-bedroom loft has a supremely contemporary sensibility, as evidenced by the gleaming metal kitchen cabinets (intended for a high-school science lab), the black granite tepee-shaped fireplace, and a sleek, elongated bathroom sink.

Marc Lawrence, an executive at Lawrence Foods (his family’s bakery and food-ingredients manufacturing company in Elk Grove Village), bought the space in...

Posted at 10:38 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/13/08

Housing Bulletin—Zero-Energy Homes on Chicago’s Far South Side

On what was once a weedy parcel of land in Veterans Park—situated on Chicago's South Side near where the Skyway crosses above 95th Street—Bernie Schmidt has built the first of what he hopes will be 20 midsize homes that use no electricity from the utility grid. If completed on the linear plot of land adjacent to rows of tidy bungalows, the subdivision, called Solar Verde Estates, will be the city's first zero-energy block...

Posted at 08:56 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/11/08

Sale of the Week—Get Width It in Ravenswood

List Price: $2.05 million
Sale Price: $2.35 million
The Property: Not yet finished but already sold, this raised 12-room house is super-wide by city standards: a full 40 feet, on a lot that is 43 feet wide. “It’s totally suburban,” says Brent Meder, whose Meder Properties built it, as he walks across...

Posted at 06:20 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

08/07/08

On The Market—Lake Forest’s Chimneys Cottage, Reborn

List Price: $11,995,000
The Property: Originally built in the 1890s by a retired Confederate general as a small summer cottage book-ended by two chimneys, this house grew in several directions over the years. By the time Tim and Gail  Anderson bought it in 1999...

Posted at 10:01 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/06/08

Housing Bulletin— A Gloomy Forecast from the University of Illinois’ Geoffrey Hewings

On Monday I talked with Geoffrey Hewings, a professor of geography, economics, and urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The director of REAL, the university’s Regional Economics Applications Laboratory, Hewings tracks residential real estate across the state; his forecasts are part of the Illinois Association of Realtors’ periodic reports. In the organization’s latest report, released at the end of July, Hewings predicted that...

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08/04/08

Sale of the Week—Surf and Turf in Lake View

List Price: $2,349,000
Sale Price: $2,235,000
The Property: One of ten new high-end houses that front on a private greensward where a street would ordinarily be, this 13-room Italianate brick house has six bedrooms, five-plus baths, and two fireplaces. An 11th house that also shares the common green, along with a clubhouse with a swimming pool and...

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07/31/08

On The Market—An East Lake Shore Drive “Starter Home”

List price: $2.25 million
The Property: A three-bedroom condo on the sixth floor of an elegant building overlooking Chicago’s Oak Street Beach, this is what the listing agent Mitch Serrano calls “a starter home on East Lake Shore...

Posted at 08:56 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/30/08

Housing Bulletin—Inventive Incentives

What’s keeping people from buying homes right now? Are they worried that a property’s value will drop after they buy it? Or are they wondering what will happen to the economy when we have a new president? Or maybe they are scared that if they buy a condo, they won’t be allowed to swim naked in the...

Posted at 08:50 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/28/08

Sale of the Week—The Bronzeville Home of Two African American Pioneers

List Price: $1.2 million
Sale Price: $1.125 million
The Property: Until its sale earlier this month, this vintage 1895 brownstone had remained for 50 years in the family of a pioneering African American couple. In 1958, Claude Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett bought the 12-room residence, and its enormous lot, on what was then...

Posted at 11:16 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (2)