The Property: This classic red-brick colonial with three bedrooms, two-plus bathrooms, and two fireplaces provided a rare opportunity to get an appealing, nicely updated home in exclusive Kenilworth for under $1 million—and it has played that role twice in the past year. Built in 1929, the house sold for $5,000 less than the price it had brought just ten months before, in June 2006. And that was with a few significant upgrades since that earlier sale: repair to a basement leak and new landscaping. “My sellers made some very nice improvements,” says their agent, Julie Miller of the Hudson Company, but she declined to explain why they resold so soon. “I would have loved to see them get more, but given that they wanted to sell in a relatively short period of time, we’re fine.”
In June 2006—after it had been put on the market with a recently rehabbed kitchen, master bath, and second bath—the house sold for $10,000 more than its $935,000 asking price after just two months. Those buyers (the most recent sellers) then put the house back on the market in December, six months after closing on their purchase of it. With the upgrades, they initially priced it at $985,000. They later dropped their asking price to $975,000 before agreeing to sell for $940,000. That deal closed on April 19th.
Price Points: At either selling price—this April’s or last June’s—the house was a good buy. It stands on a block of pretty homes within walking distance of a Metra station, and any children who might live here would go to two premier schools: Joseph Sears Elementary and New Trier Township High. And it is relatively affordable in these upper-end environs: of 24 sales in Kenilworth in the past 12 months, only seven have gone for under $1 million, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois. “That house is in the hot price range,” Miller says. “It’s very hard to get into the New Trier district in a nice house in good condition for under a million dollars, sad to say.”
The Property: Designed by the great North Shore architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, this home was built in 1913 as one half of a pair of twin gatehouses for a lavish lakefront estate on Sheridan Road. When the present sellers, Tierney Danehy and Tom McNulty, bought the place in 1995, it had been severed from the estate house (which still stands) and was being rented out, with two apartments upstairs and four two-car garage bays on the main floor. “It was great space that we could turn into whatever we wanted,” says Danehy.
Danehy and McNulty put a large living/dining room in two bays and a kitchen/great room in the other two bays, with a staircase between the rooms. (They replaced the garage doors with sliding doors.) Upstairs, they put four bedrooms, two baths, a laundry room, and a den in what had been two servants’ apartments and some additional space above their new two-car garage. The couple also preserved many of Shaw’s touches, such as an elaborate rope molding below the eaves and the two-toned brickwork inside the house. (The two exterior staircases that used to lead to the apartments are still there, although they are only decorative now.) When adding new details, such as exterior door entablature, the couple and their architect, Lesa Rizzolo, did an excellent job of staying in touch with the character of the original structure.
Price Points: With its Sheridan Road address, its views into a wooded estate, and a lot that is more than a third of an acre, this home is a prize. But its floor plan will not appeal to someone who is shopping for an impressive center-entry house; it is a warm and appealing home, but light on grandeur. The price tag is in keeping with Glencoe, where two thirds of the 89 homes that sold there over the past year went for more than a million dollars.
Listing Agent: The homeowner, Tierney Danehy (of Village Green Realty), is handling the sale: 847-501-4300.
Last week, two real-estate projects in the Chicago tradition of “make no little plans” took some giant steps forward, as both plans won approval from the city’s Plan Commission. One is the ongoing proposal to build a twisting 150-story condo tower—the architect Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire—just north of the Chicago River and west of Lake Shore Drive. Plans for the tower are in their fourth incarnation since the original developer, Christopher Carley, unveiled a rendering of the building in July 2005. (Garrett Kelleher’s Dublin-based Shelbourne Development is now handling the project.) A subsequent redesign made the building look like a stumpy version of the architect’s initial curvaceous beauty, but the latest version brought some sexiness back to the design. On April 19th, the commission gave its unanimous approval to the latest plan; it now goes before the City Council’s zoning committee on April 26th, and from there to the full council in May.
At the same meeting, the Plan Commission also approved a proposal by Walton Street Capital to put offices, condos, hotel rooms, and parking in the mammoth old Main Post Office that hangs over the Congress Expressway just west of the South Branch of the Chicago River. The 2.5-million-square-foot structure, built in 1921 (with a 1933 addition), has stood empty for almost 11 years, since the United States Postal Service moved into a new facility immediately south of it. During those years, proposals surfaced to put everything from an Ikea store to a casino to an auto mall in the architectural white elephant. Walton Street plans to remove almost a third of the building’s gargantuan mass, leaving two end towers and a low section between them that will house the hotel.
The Spire and the post office have different fundamentals. Potentially an instant landmark—and, if built, the tallest building in the Americas—the Spire would put about 1,200 condos along a very desirable stretch of lakefront; the mixed-use, rehabbed post office would drop 300 condos into an area not yet established as a residential neighborhood. Construction on both projects is slated to begin later this year.
The Property: On April 11th—the day before this five-room house sold for $220,000—the National Association of Realtors (NAR) forecast that the national median price for an existing home in 2007 will be $220,300. If that prediction holds up, it means that half the houses sold this year will go for less than this Lindenhurst property, while half will sell for more. (The NAR forecast anticipates a slight drop in home values nationwide, the first in almost four decades.) Although this five-bedroom, one-bath house is small—920 square feet and a one-car garage—it does have a view out back of a small lake; a playground, a tennis court, and a trail-crossed forest preserve are only a short walk away. Throw in a big, fenced-in back yard, a low-maintenance all-brick exterior, and a stylish kitchen (maple cabinets and stainless-steel appliances), and you’ve got yourself a pretty nice midpoint.
Price Points: The sellers bought this 39-year-old house in 2004 and undertook an ambitious upgrade that included a new roof and a kitchen rehab. When they were transferred out of town, they listed the house (on January 1st) for $234,900, but got no action. “A few years ago, it would have gone in the $230,000s with all those improvements,” says Tina Henry, their agent. Confronted by a softening market, they cut the price to $224,900 and landed a buyer.
Buyer: Not yet identified in public records
Sales agent: Tina Henry, Century 21 Kreuser & Seiler
The Property: A duplex in a classic 1920s Gold Coast building designed by Andrew Rebori, this five-room, two-bedroom apartment manages to create elegance in an economical space. Except for the dramatic two-story living room—with a charming fireplace inglenook, a sensuously curved staircase, and big windows looking out onto Schiller Street—the rooms are relatively small, though not cramped. “These apartments [in the building] are all like movie sets,” says Louise Trafelet, pointing to the interior balconies and the Jazz Age plaster detailing. Three years ago, Trafelet and her husband, Dan, moved in and revived this unit, shoehorning all the requisite appliances into the kitchen and the master and guest baths. Now they plan to move into the unit next door, which badly needs help.
Price Points: The home is one of 18 apartments in the building, each originally intended as in-town getaways, primarily for residents of the North Shore. If you have priced one of the hotel-condo units popping up around the city, you may want to take a look at this place. It doesn’t offer room service or other luxury amenities, but at this price—and with this location—it would be hard to find something with more élan. As a full-time home, it might be a bit small for more than a single person—or a couple without much stuff.
For people whose job demands that they park all over the city, there may be nothing more frustrating than hunting for a parking space in a permit-zoned Chicago neighborhood. A potential solution to that problem isn’t working—most likely because of tinkering by city hall.
Permit-zone parking started on the Northwest Side in 1979 in the neighborhood around Northeastern Illinois University, an innovative way to stop students from swiping all the on-street parking from local residents. Permit zones have since proliferated, and now Chicago has at least 1,300 different zones.
For more than a decade, real-estate agents working in the city have complained that they can’t park near the houses that their clients want to see—so over the past year the Chicago Association of Realtors (CAR) helped arrange a special pass: an all-zones permit, paid for by agents, that allows them to park in any zone between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.
But after critics said the agents didn’t deserve that special privilege, Mayor Richard M. Daley cut the hours on the pass to 9:30 am to 6 p.m. Trouble is, “most homebuyers are only free to look at houses after work,” says Brian Bernardoni, director of governmental affairs for CAR. ‘After work’ would typically mean after 6 p.m.—when the all-zone permits no longer apply.
The result: six weeks after the permits first became available, the office of Miguel del Valle, the city clerk, reports that only 32 people have paid the $300 for an all-zones permit (the pass is also available to home health-care workers). There are at least 11,000 real-estate agents in Chicago; if the pass had included the evening hours, Bernardoni estimates that something like 3,000 agents would have bought them by now.
So don’t blame your real-estate agent the next time you have to walk several blocks to see a house. After all, the agent can’t very well include a $100 parking ticket in your closing costs.
The Property: This newly built 11-room, five-bedroom house set the sales record for Oak Lawn when it was sold on April 6th. It is on the same street as—and within two blocks of—this southwest suburb’s two previous top sales. The developer Timothy Desmond of Leeside Builders built all three of those high-priced houses, which each replaced smaller homes more representative of Oak Lawn’s modest housing stock. Kathy Walker, Desmond’s real-estate agent, points to some of the appealing amenities that the developer includes in his homes: wrought-iron stair rails, Bosch appliances, and jack-and-jill baths (a bathroom shared by two bedrooms). But the real key to Desmond’s success, says Walker, are the large lots. Whereas most Oak Lawn lots are 50 feet wide, Desmond has succeeded in “finding these wide lots—60 feet wide—where you can put a three-car garage,” says Walker. “A three-car garage is hard to come by in Oak Lawn.”
Price Points: While most houses in Oak Lawn sell for between $220,000 and $320,000, the suburb has had a spate of new-home sales whose price tags topped $500,000 (there have been 32 of them since the first sold in August 2005, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois). They are sprinkled throughout the town, but the biggest concentration is west of Central Avenue. Walker believes many of the town’s higher-priced homes have drawn value-hunters from outside the immediate area—which is no surprise. With access to highway and train transportation, a fine library, and lots of shopping along revitalized 95th Street, this little suburb tucked a short distance southwest of Midway Airport is a good place to look for housing bargains.
Buyer: Though the buyer of this house has not yet been identified in public records, Walker says Oak Lawn’s three top-priced houses went to people from Chicago’s North Side, Naperville, and another suburb. “In any of those places, these houses would have cost $750,000—at least,” she figures.
The Property: Designed in the late 1920s by Scipione Del Campo for John Tiberi (the owner of a cement company), this 12-room brick house on the city’s Far Southwest Side resembles Tiberi’s boyhood home in Italy. While its blond good looks would stand out in any neighborhood, the house literally rises above its neighbors because its basement was built at ground level and then the yard was backfilled up to the house’s first floor.
The interior craftwork elegantly complements the house’s exterior. Most of the doorways are arched, a plaster mantel in the main-floor study is as ornate as anything in a Renaissance chapel, and the passage from the master bedroom to the sitting area is framed by two twisted columns that suggest a Venetian palazzo. The house has four other bedrooms, a sauna and a wine cellar in the basement, and a fountain in the back yard.
The extensive murals and other interior decorations—all meticulously maintained—have not stopped the current owners from treating the house as a home. “We’ve never lived as if this were a museum,” says Mari-Ellyn Morreale, whose family has lived in the house for 21 years after buying the place from Tiberi’s estate. (Her husband, Phillip Morreale, is a doctor at Little Company of Mary Hospital). To make her point, she shows where her three children threw darts, drew on walls, and stowed their sports equipment as they were growing up.
Price Points: The $1.4-million asking price far exceeds Beverly’s record sale of $850,000 (according to records of the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois). Its kitchen and breakfast room (a later addition) are dated and surprisingly modest—but because they share none of the house’s interior detailing, adding a new kitchen would not harm the overall design.
There are far more homes on the market locally than there were at this time last year. As of April 1st, there were 43.3 percent more properties listed for sale in Chicago and the six-county metro area than on the same date a year ago, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLS). What’s more, ZipRealty, a California-based sales firm with a sizable Chicago presence, determined last week that Chicago’s inventory of homes for sale jumped by 7.5 percent from February to March—exceeding the 6.5 percent average for 18 major metropolitan areas surveyed by the company. It’s also a much bigger jump than the norm reported last week by the Wall Street Journal. The paper cited Credit Suisse Group’s finding that, since 1985, the average February-to-March increase in inventory nationwide has been 1.7 percent.
With the average time to sell a home here now hovering around 137 days, sellers seem to have acknowledged the change in the local real-estate market. “There’s been a change in sellers’ expectations,” says Terry Semmens, ZipRealty’s Chicago district director. “They’re waiting to buy [until] after they’ve sold. Too many people suffered through 2006 supporting multiple house payments, so now [sellers] are putting the house up before they go looking for their next house.” The big uptick in inventory now, he suggests, is the result of many sellers calculating that, in order to get moved into a new place by the beginning of the next school year, “they should get started now so they don’t get stressed when summer is coming around and they still haven’t sold.”
At the same time, Semmens says, sellers seem to be willing now to take offers that are contingent on would-be buyers’ selling their old house first. “This is part of reality again,” he says. It all means that buyers see the balance tilting even further in their favor with more houses to choose from—and more favorable contractual terms.
Neighborhood: Gold Coast, Chicago List price: $12 million Sale price: $11 million
The Property: This imposing stone mansion—23 rooms in all—is a relic of Lake Shore Drive’s early days as an avenue dotted with opulent single-family homes. Built in 1890 in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, the house declined in the 20th century. When he bought it in 1989, says the entrepreneur Art Frigo, the place was “a mess and completely closed off, except for one large room.” Frigo also bought the similarly rundown mansion next door, paying $3.75 million for both places. He restored both, installing two lavish condos in each of the houses; when those failed to sell, he ended up living in one and renting the other three. Eventually he sold both condos in the neighboring house to a family who knitted them back together into one home. Now this house has sold as a single residence, too. “The market caught up to the house,” says Patty Navilio, Frigo’s real estate agent then and now. “Back when Art bought it, nobody wanted to live in 15,000 square feet, but now we’re in the era of the mega-house.”
The Seller: Frigo, whose entrepreneurial interests are numerous, says he now spends more time in Florida than Chicago. “I had to let go of the house,” he says, “but I didn’t want to.” After trying a few years ago to sell both units in this house as a package, Frigo decided to convert the mansion back into a single home. Once the work was completed, the house sold in five days in late March.
Buyer: Not identified in public records.
Sales agents: Patty Navilio and Mary Bennett, Koenig & Strey GMAC
The Property: This classic red-brick colonial with three bedrooms, two-plus bathrooms, and two fireplaces provided a rare opportunity to get an appealing, nicely updated home in exclusive Kenilworth for under $1 million—and it has played that role twice in the past year. Built in 1929, the house sold for $5,000 less than the price it had brought just ten months before, in June 2006. And that was with a few significant upgrades since that earlier sale: repair to a basement leak and new landscaping. “My sellers made some very nice improvements,” says their agent, Julie Miller of the Hudson Company, but she declined to explain why they resold so soon. “I would have loved to see them get more, but given that they wanted to sell in a relatively short period of time, we’re fine.”
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