Real estate news & trends
Latest news from YoChicago
Schools
A recent Atlantic Cities post sketched the real estate issues that accompany school closings: One of the thorniest issues (in what is a veritable forest of mess) is what to do with those school buildings once they’re empty. Often, the facilities are in poor shape, with promised renovations put off quasi-indefinitely. Many are located in ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 10, 2013
The owners of the 3-bedroom, 2 ½ bath split-level at 793 S Washington St have renovated the home over time to make it a warm and cozy environment. The main level opens into an L-shaped living / dining room with hardwood floors. Adjacent to the updated eat-in kitchen is an expansive deck overlooking a large ...
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Posted by sponsored post on March 26, 2013
The 4-bedroom, 4-bath Nantucket-style home at 249 E St Charles Rd is in a convenient center-of-town Elmhurst location. This like-new, spacious home was built in 2008 and boasts 3,000 square feet of open-plan living area. The home has a separate formal dining room with butler’s pantry, a large kitchen island adjacent to a breakfast area ...
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Posted by sponsored post on March 19, 2013
The 3-bedroom, 2-bath ranch at 210 W Van Buren St has a great Elmhurst location. It’s diagonally across the street from Jackson Elementary School, a few blocks from Bryan Middle School, and close to everything that Oak Brook has to offer. The corner-lot home has been beautifully rehabbed and tastefully decorated. It has an unusually ...
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Posted by sponsored post on March 18, 2013
The 3-bedroom, 2-bath home at 1129 Willow Rd in Winnetka has been on the market for almost 4 months despite a sub-$500K price tag. The market time is a sign that buyers have found it deficient in some manner compared to the competition. There’s nothing comparable currently on the market in Winnetka, but similar homes ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 23, 2013
This six-year old home has an open floor plan with a first-floor office off the living room, a generously sized kitchen that opens to the family room and a breakfast area. The bedroom level of the home is outstanding, with four large, well-separated, bright corner bedrooms and 3 full baths, including the master. There’s a ...
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Posted by sponsored post on August 23, 2012
The 3,600 square foot home at 318 Fair Ave has a number of features you don’t often find in newer construction in Elmhurst, especially in a home priced at $725,000. For starters, there’s a 3-car garage, made possible by the home’s location on a wide lot. The home has a volume living room with a ...
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Posted by sponsored post on July 25, 2012
A 1,730 square foot 3-bedroom, 3-bath condo at 660 Winnetka Mews just came on the market for $329,000. It had previously sold for $485,500 in October of 2001. The unit has an updated kitchen with white cabinets and granite countertops. All three bedrooms are generously sized. There’s a fireplace in the large living room, and ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 6, 2012
Five years ago today we featured a video on the paradox of Bucktown elementary schools. The paradox or, more accurately, the anomaly? Bucktown‘s population was: … young, affluent and mostly white. But visit a Bucktown elementary school and you’ll see a much different picture – Hispanic children, typically from low-income families, playing with their friends ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on March 19, 2012
The 3-bedroom, 2-bath ranch at 826 S Fairfield Ave is an upgraded variation on the typical ranch home. The floor plan affords privacy to the bedroom wing and includes an eat-in kitchen, a separate dining area, and a light-filled living room with windows on two sides. The home has hardwood floors and crown moldings. There’s ...
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Posted by sponsored post on March 10, 2012
If you’re a single person or a childless couple you may not much care where your neighborhood school is located, or what its reputation or attendance boundaries are. That could be a big mistake. Chicago has only a very few highly sought-after neighborhood schools, and a property’s location within its attendance boundaries can have a ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 12, 2012
There’s been a great deal of attention paid to “food deserts” in Chicago, i.e. neighborhoods where fresh food is hard to find. More worrisome for Chicago’s future is the fact that large parts of the South and West sides of the city are school deserts, neighborhoods where decent public or private schools are non-existent. Perhaps ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 9, 2012
From Winnetka’s New Trier High School: New Trier High School students in the Class of 2011 achieved an average composite score of 27.5 on the ACT, the highest score the school has ever posted and among the top average composite scores in the nation among public open-enrollment high schools. … Overall, New Trier students achieved ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 3, 2012
Price appreciation in Chicago real estate? In this market? Am I out of my mind to be talking about appreciation? For more than a decade Chicago’s real estate market has either been swept up in a frenzied bubble or mired in a sky-will-continue-to-fall-for-years-to-come funk. Due to extraordinary market conditions many home buyers never learned the ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 21, 2011
The 2500 block of Patterson is a quiet cul-de-sac that’s been built out with newer million-dollar homes in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood. It presents a beautifully landscaped streetscape that’s teeming with young children in the early evening. The location is in the highly sought-after Bell School District, which accounts for the unusually large number of ...
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Posted by sponsored post on November 20, 2011
A 4-bedroom, 2-bath ranch home at 537 Romona Rd in Wilmette is being offered for rent at $1,900 a month. That’s an unusually low price for a 4-bedroom home in Wilmette. It’s also available for purchase for $399,000. The home, which last sold for $459,000 in 2004, is on a 63 x 132 lot almost ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 3, 2011
Yesterday I visited the Crescent Park subdivision in Elmhurst with Tom Makinney and Maria Gracik of Koenig & Strey’s Gracik Makinney Group. We shot sponsored videos of two homes, which will be live at YouTube within a few days. The homes, at 350 E Ridge Ave, priced at $439,000, and 511 S Parkview Ave, priced ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 16, 2011
We’ve previously noted the wide variance among Evanston census tracts in private school attendance among elementary school age children. In Census Tract 8092, a part of Evanston’s Fifth Ward, only 6% of elementary school age children attend private schools. That census tract is more than 80% African-American and Hispanic, and is the only Evanston Ward ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 5, 2011
We’re not seeing – and not likely to see for some time – large new condo projects, but infill development is continuing in this depressed market. A number of the projects that are being touted as “new” are revivals or completions of developments that have been around for some time. Today’s new listing report includes ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on August 2, 2011
A hat tip to Anne West’s informative North Shore Views blog for alerting me to one of her recent listings in northwest Evanston, a short block south of Central Street. Here’s a part of Anne’s description of this fee-simple townhome: This townhome at 3326 Culver St. lives like a single family house. It’s a half ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on July 31, 2011
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