About a year and a half ago I posted on restaurateur and designer Jerry Kleiner’s West Town Villa which was for sale at 1424 W Ohio. In fact, at the time, the house had already been on the market for quite a while. As I pointed out then the challenge was that the house was by far the most expensive house in the neighborhood and few people want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood.
Well, the house finally went under contract back in September and closed on Thursday for $2.35 MM. It’s unusual for a closing to take this long so I can only speculate that with conventional financing the appraisal might have been an issue. How the heck do you find comps for a house like this? You don’t.
Just to give you an idea of how unique this property is (be sure to check out the photos in the previous post linked above) for the neighborhood…look at all the West Town sales of single family homes above $2 MM in the last 8 years in the map below. The numbers on the balloons represent the price rank of each property. Only 2 out of 27 have sold south of Division and this is the only one that sold south of Chicago Avenue. Also note that this property sold at a higher price than the other property that sold south of Division. In addition, this is the only high priced property that has sold east of Ashland,which has a lower income demographic than west of Ashland for reasons I’ll never understand.
As I mentioned above, this house had been on and off the market for 4 years. Here is the history of the listing:
- February 2011 listed at $2.9 MM
- August 2011 cancelled
- September 2012 relisted at $2.675 MM with a new realtor because obviously it was the first realtor’s fault that it hadn’t sold even though he apparently concluded that it was overpriced.
- May 2013 raised the price to $2.75 MM even though it hadn’t sold at the lower price because obviously the market was stronger then.
- December 2013 cancelled the listing…I’m sure because that’s the slow time of the year
- May 2014 raised the price again to $2.795 since things had been going so well for him
- August 2014 cancelled the listing
After the August cancellation they must have been marketing the property off the MLS because they reactivated the listing in Septeember only to mark it under contract the same day. Interestingly, they show it listed at $2.5 MM but that’s a bogus number if they already had a contract in hand. It looks like it then took 3 months to get the mortgage to my earlier point above.
#chicagorealestate #RichAndFamousHomes
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