01/31/08

On the Market—Garden Splendor in Fort Sheridan

List Price: $2.45 million
The Property: When the picturesque but obsolete Fort Sheridan military base on the Lake Michigan bluffs between Highland Park and Lake Forest was being converted to a residential neighborhood in the late 1990s, a key member of the redevelopment team, Richard Stein, called dibs on what must have seemed at the time like a questionable parcel. While some of his teammates snapped up handsome blufftop homes that had housed the base’s top officers, Stein took a long, squat building a few blocks from the lakefront...

Posted at 12:39 PM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/08

Housing Bulletin—Who Benefits from Another Fed Rate Cut

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to cut its rate again later today, but that doesn’t mean you should call your mortgage broker this afternoon in search of a lower payment. You should have called yesterday.

There is a widespread misconception that mortgage rates are directly connected to the Fed’s funds rate. In fact, the relationship is more along the lines of “Me and My Shadow”: the two tend to move approximately in step with one another, but neither one orders the other around.

“Mortgage bond markets meet every day, much more often than the Fed,” says Dan Green, a mortgage planner and loan officer at Mobium Mortgage here in Chicago and the author of themortgagereports.com. “Most of what the Fed is responding to has already been...

Posted at 05:51 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/28/08

Deal of the Week—Carlos Zambrano’s New Home

List Price: $2.8 million
Sale Price: $2.66 million
The Property: Come spring’s return of the Cubs to Wrigley Field, pitcher Carlos Zambrano will be calling this 13-room, vaguely Prairie-style house his seasonal home. On January 18th, Zambrano closed on his purchase of the three-year-old house, which has six bedrooms, four full and three partial baths, and two fireplaces. Set in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood on a block that was, until six years ago, industrial property, the 6,700-square-foot house stands on an extra-wide lot: 37.5 feet (the standard city lot is 25 feet wide). The house was designed by...

Posted at 05:51 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/24/08

On the Market—A New (but Authentic) Craftsman in Wilmette

List Price: $1.795 million
The Property: You could say that the architect John Crittenden and the builder Dan Cohan are “Stickleys” for detail. That is, they are devotees of Gustav Stickley, the early 20th-century American architect who led the Craftsman movement in residential architecture, a descendant of the Arts & Crafts movement in England.

On a teardown lot in Wilmette, Crittenden and Cohan—whose company is called Round Peg—created a new house that, except for the two-car garage out front, might pass for an original Craftsman, with its abundant use of natural materials, its built-in benches and bookcases, and its reliance on daylight as an essential piece of the residents’...

Posted at 08:06 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (3)

01/23/08

Housing Bulletin—The Resale Condo Squeeze Play

A few years back, when investing in residential real estate seemed like a fast money-maker, two guys went in together on three condos at the Metropolis, a terra cotta-clad building at State and Monroe Streets that was being converted from office and retail into 169 condos.

But when the condos were ready for their investors to take possession, the market had changed and the guys couldn’t sell their three units as fast as they had counted on; they ended up in foreclosure. This month, a real-estate agent working for the guys’ lenders sold one of those condos, a two-bedroom unit with parking included that the investors had originally bought for $310,000. The new sale price: $285,000. “That’s hands down a bargain,” says Peter Boland, the @properties agent who sold the condo for...

Posted at 08:48 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (4)

01/21/08

Sale of the Week—Hinsdale Record-Breaker

List Price: $5.3 million
Sale Price: $5.2 million
The Property: This stone and stucco house in Hinsdale unfolds like a catalog of exquisite details. The bird-beak roof points and stone-arched entries are complemented inside by a stone fireplace in the foyer, a wood-beamed and –paneled ceiling soaring 24 feet above the family room, and a hanging oval staircase that winds among the house’s four levels like a hand-carved ribbon of walnut.

The slate-roofed house is the design of the architect Charles Vincent George and the builder Jim McMahon, who have collaborated on other super-lavish homes in Hinsdale. This one, McMahon says, “is definitely the best we’ve done.” The house’s Country French character is pervasive, extending even to the outdoor fireplace, a monumental stone and stucco...

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Posted at 07:32 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/17/08

On the Market—Pure Prairie in Hyde Park

List price: $1.95 million
The Property: One hundred years old in 2008, this 14-room Prairie-style home has been thoroughly renovated and updated but at no cost to its original character, which comes from five-piece banded molding in the main rooms, a massive fireplace bricked in a herringbone pattern, and numerous windows on three sides (a rarity in Hyde Park’s older attached houses). The Tudor look of the beamed upper and brick lower portions carries through this and four other houses built on this corner in a Hyde Park “Professors’ Row” cluster. The architects of the cluster, Tallmadge & Watson, were among the leading Prairie architects—in fact...

Posted at 11:17 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/16/08

Housing Bulletin—Transit Funding and the Real-Estate Market

Last week, months of wrangling in the state legislature over how to fund the metro area’s rail and bus lines resulted in a deal that included an increase on the tax on real-estate transfers in Chicago. That increase¬—$3.50 per $1,000 in value of the property sold—will all go to mass transit, presuming the Chicago City Council approves the tax. (The current tax—$7.50 per $1,000—does not fund mass transit.)

The reasoning behind the measure was that Chicago was paying less than its share for transit because its sales-tax receipts weren’t up to what the collar counties collected. Since the owners of city property—not just housing, but retail and commercial real estate—clearly benefit from...

Posted at 09:56 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/08

Sale of the Week—Chicago’s Old Norwood

The Property: This 128-year-old house is in the heart of Old Norwood, a neighborhood on the city’s far Northwest Side. With its curving streets, charming older homes, relatively big city lots, a big park, and a nearby commuter train station, Old Norwood is “the best-kept secret ‘Mayberry’ in Chicago,” says Lisa Sanders, the Coldwell Banker agent who represented...

Posted at 07:34 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/10/08

On the Market—Twin Moderns in Ukrainian Village

List Price: $1,049,000 each
The Properties: These two sleek houses are the design of Studio Dwell Architects. Behind their almost-identical cedar and glass facades, they have spacious floor plans, sharp Arcilinea kitchens, and top-floor master bedrooms with exquisite views of two local landmarks: the gold dome of Sts. Vladimir and Olga Church and the multiple copper spires of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral.

Each house has a big double-height front room that combines living and dining with an almost vertiginous view up two flights of stairs. Beyond are a kitchen and...

Posted at 10:33 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (6)

01/09/08

Housing Bulletin—Where is the Bottom?

In the late 1990s, economists, real-estate analysts, and others were puzzled by the housing market. House prices kept going up, confounding everyone’s forecasts. Ten years later, we’re on the other side of that hill: Prices are going down, but nobody seems to know how far they will descend.

Since home prices are a moving target at the moment, up-to-date price data is hard to come by. But I have been hearing routinely that appraisers now use 2004 prices as their benchmarks; just a few months ago, they were using 2005 prices. A 2004 price would mean that after 13 years of increases, we’ve slipped back about three years. That means if you bought your home before 2004, you are still ahead of the game. But that’s only if the market doesn’t fall any farther—and most forecasts say...

Posted at 08:57 AM in Housing Bulletin | Permalink | Comments (9)

01/07/08

Sale of the Week—A Lincoln Park Queen Anne

List Price: $1,879,000
Sale Price: $1,879,000
The Property: The brick, limestone, and wood façade of this Queen Anne-style home is a flirting coquette among matrons on an east Lincoln Park block where the neighbors are all fine homes, but not as confidently decorative as this one. From its painted wooden gable front and cornice supports down through the carved limestone tablets above some windows and a hefty wood-and-glass front door, the exterior is enlivened by an array of textures and colors.

Inside, the seduction continues. Built in 1895, the house has ten rooms on three floors, plus a...

Posted at 06:40 AM in Sale of the Week | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/03/08

On the Market—Georgian on my Mind

List Price: $3,625,000

The Property: This Georgian townhouse on Chicago’s Astor Street feels as if it were made for ambassadorial entertaining. The glass-fronted entry door opens onto an entry hall with a marble and ebony floor; from there, a broad staircase leads to a pillared gallery hall that sets the stage for a handsome living room with a trio of Palladian windows and Juliet balconies.

Built in the 1890s—possibly as a Victorian, its selling agent says, and reworked sometime later—the house has 11 rooms and four-plus baths on four stories, as well as a rooftop deck. Two of the four bedrooms...

Posted at 10:53 AM in On the Market | Permalink | Comments (1)