680 Lake Shore Drive was formerly the American Furniture Mart, and had an address of 666 N Lake Shore Dr. After the building’s conversion to a mixed-used condo development, the address was changed at the behest of the Playboy Company as a condition of its moving into the building. In this video, Joe Zekas and Prudential Rubloff agent Francesca Rose discuss 680’s history, its condo association structure, and current availability of condos in the building.
Some sellers have the luxury of waiting. Below are four single-family homes who have made themselves at home on the MLS. Note: One of these homes is not like the others, and shouldn’t be too hard to spot.
1437 N Dearborn St (pictured) in the Gold Coast: Four bedrooms, five baths; built in 1892; on the market 912 days. Originally priced at $4.1 million; currently priced at $3.7 million.
3423 N Kedzie Ave in Avondale: Six bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 4,680 square feet; built in 2007; on the market 885 days. Originally priced in the $840s; currently priced in the $740s.
1436 N Astor St in the Gold Coast: Seven bedrooms, nine baths, 6,500 square feet; built in 1892; on the market 783 days. Originally priced at $3.69 million; currently priced at $3.39 million.
1258 N Lake Shore Dr in the Gold Coast: Four bedrooms, 5.5 baths, 5,162 square feet; built in 1895; on the market 781 days. Originally priced at $5.8 million; currently priced at $4.4 million.
The guys on the client services end of our company occasionally get tips from their own broker contacts and pass them my way. Last week, someone at Koenig & Strey offered this rehabbed three-flat at 3306 S Lowe St as something we might want to check out.
The building dates back to 1890 but has undergone a makeover in the past year or two, making it, in the words of listing agent Robert Atkins, “Bridgeport’s premier certified green development.” The home as it looks today is at right; on the left side of the screen-cap at bottom, you can see the way it looked when Google photographed the neighborhood.
The one unit listed for sale is a three-bedroom / 2.5-bath duplex with over 2,600 square feet, priced in the $480s. (That includes a 1,000 square-foot loft with half-bath that can be used as an office or media room.) The home’s improvements include recycled woodwork and glass shower doors, man-made Zodiaq countertops, energy-saving light fixtures, Icynene spray foam insulation, Energy Star windows and doors, and a 95-percent efficient water heater, and European cabinets and bath fixtures.
The unit comes with one parking space. Assessments covering water and parking are $190 a month.
There isn’t much of a three-bedroom condo market in Bridgeport, especially east of Halsted — those that have sold in the past two years had significantly less floor space and sold from the high $100s to high $200s. In fact, this duplex on Lowe represents the high end of the price spectrum for condos in the neighborhood by an almost $90,000 margin; most of the listings priced between the $450s and $550s in Bridgeport are single-family homes (some with as much as 3,600 square feet) or multi-unit buildings.
Last fall, the developers of Michigan Avenue Tower II at 1400 S Michigan Ave put 40 condos up for auction at minimum bid prices of $99,000 to $375,000. On auction day, November 15, buyers won 43 units at prices well above those minimums — anywhere from $160,000 for a 580 square-foot studio to $601,000 for a 2,120 square-foot three-bedroom. In total, buyers put down more than $11.2 million in bids in a single afternoon.
One week later, Weichert, Realtors – Frankel & Giles rolled out new prices for the building’s unsold units. Although we didn’t get a full accounting of the price cuts, we learned that most of the remaining one- to three-bedrooms were discounted 23 to 28 percent from their pre-auction prices, putting them at a new range from $180s to the $550s. Two penthouses were also listed at $1.8 million and $1.9 million.
Yesterday afternoon I pulled up the latest info on Michigan Avenue Tower II to count how many units actually closed after the auction and to see how prices had changed since late November.
Since the auction date, Cook County has recorded 77 sales at Michigan Avenue Tower II ranging from the $170s to $600s. Presumably some of these sales were units purchased at auction.
Today, Frankel & Giles is marketing four one-bedrooms priced from the $210s to $240s, one two-bedroom priced in the $490s, and two four-bedroom penthouses, most likely the same ones mentioned above, now priced at $1.69 million apiece. Some listings mention garage parking priced at $37,500 per space.
Three one-bedroom resales are listed from the $220s to $280s, and one two-bedroom is listed in the $430s.
Rentals listed on the MLS include a one-bedroom priced at $1,700 a month and three two-bedrooms priced from $2,300 to $2,400.
Last week a couple of owners at SoNo, 860 W Blackhawk St, used the comments section of an old post to invite us into their homes. Yesterday I met up with Ryan Levy and Kim Hamilton, who own corner units on SoNo’s 23rd floor, to find out what attracted them to the building, their particular [...]
The Enterprise Companies and Mesirow Financial Real Estate have received an extension on their $129.5-million construction loan for Walton on the Park, 2 W Delaware Pl, and may opt to lease 98 of the high-rise’s 201 unsold condos, Crain’s reports.
According to the article, 22 units have closed and another 81 are under contract. Coldwell Banker, [...]
Just around the corner from the Brown Line station in Lake View’s Southport Corridor is a new 4,800 square-foot single-family home at 1337 W Roscoe St, which Fresh Horizon Realty brought back to market earlier this summer. Its $1.59 million price tag translates to just $333 a square foot, in an area where other new-construction [...]
This spring, Chicago Magazine named Calumet Heights one of 20 great towns and neighborhoods in the Chicago area, citing its “impression of suburban stillness,” the number of active and retired police officers who call it home, the presence of the public Earhart and Black grade schools, the private St Ailbe’s Catholic School, Olive-Harvey College, and [...]
One of our company’s newest clients is Frank DeNovi, a Coldwell Banker agent who has worked with bank-owned properties for 25 years. We’re still editing the first batch of Frank’s sponsored videos — expect to see a couple on YoChicago every month — but in the meantime you can hear him give a basic overview [...]
After hitting some serious lows in March 2010, home values in Chicago went up in April, May, and now June, according to new S&P / Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released this morning.
Chicago home values (the blue line above) in June ‘10 were up 2 percent from May, up 4 percent from March, and dead even [...]
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