Chicago Illinois Real Estate Blog

A federal judge set bond at $450,000 for ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich and ordered him to post his North Side house and Washington condo as collateral even though the former governor’s lawyers said the Chicago residence is for sale.

"I have no intention of violating the bond," Blagojevich said after U.S. District Judge James Zagel issued the standard warning that he could lose both homes if he violated bail conditions.

It was the first public indication that Blagojevich, convicted last month on 17 counts of wire fraud, bribery, attempted extortion and conspiracy, has his Ravenswood Manor residence on the market.

"So if anyone’s watching this and is interested in a nice house in Ravenswood, contact the Blagojeviches," the former governor’s lawyer, Sheldon Sorosky, quipped to reporters.

The 11-room Mediterranean-style house was not listed Friday on the real estate multiple listing service, but it might be for sale informally as what is known in the real estate industry as a private listing. No asking price had been revealed for the brick house, built in the 1920s and extensively renovated after Blagojevich and his wife purchased it in 1999 for $505,000.

Queried by the judge, another Blagojevich lawyer, after conferring with Blagojevich’s wife, Patti, said the couple’s two homes had combined equity of about $600,000. Blagojevich bought the Washington condo for $183,000 in 1997 following his election to Congress.

Federal prosecutors had asked Zagel to set a $1 million bond secured by the two properties.

"I understand the symbolism of a million dollars, but $450,000 is enough," Zagel said.

After his sweeping conviction June 27, the judge barred Blagojevich from leaving northern Illinois without court permission. No sentencing date has been set.

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The Illinois Association of Realtors confessed Monday that it has overstated the median price for homes sold in Chicago — possibly since it began reporting city data as its own category in early 2008.

The group said the mistake occurred in data processing and was not intentional. It acknowledged that data exaggerated the median sales price for May, but said it may have made a similar error in monthly reports for the last three years.

It also said its monthly numbers for total home sales in Chicago may be inaccurate.

The association publishes data on home sales statewide and for the Chicago region. Since February 2008, it has broken out numbers for the city itself.

On June 21, the association said that for May, the median price for condominiums sold in Chicago was $299,000, a 10 percent increase from May 2010. “After correcting for data input error,” the group said, the result should be $249,900.

The new figure would be a year-over-year decrease of 7.8 percent, assuming the May 2010 data are valid. It was the only example of bad data that the group offered.

“It was a technical error. It was unintentional. We are very carefully going back over our numbers,” said Mary Schaefer, communications director for the Realtors association. She said it will meet today with its source for the information, Midwest Real Estate Data LLC, the multiple listing service in the Chicago area.
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RREEF, the real estate investment arm of Deutsche Bank AG (DB), said it bought a 40-story apartment tower in Chicago and two multifamily complexes in Seattle for a total of $151 million to take advantage of rising rents.

RREEF America Real Estate Investment Trust II purchased Cityfront Place, a 480-unit building with views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline, for $107 million, RREEF said today in a statement. The REIT paid $44 million for Eden Hill and Sweetbrier, two four-story buildings with 81 apartments and 27,000 square feet (2,500 square meters) of street-level retail in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.

“Seattle’s economy is in recovery and is outpacing the U.S. due to a rebounding aerospace industry and a concentrated tech sector,” Mayura Hooper, a spokeswoman for Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank, said in an e-mail. In Chicago, “the confluence of limited new supply and enhanced demand is setting up conditions for strong rent growth,” she said.

Investor demand for U.S. commercial real estate, including apartment buildings, is being driven up by a lack of new supply and low interest rates, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said in a report last month. Apartment vacancies fell to the lowest in almost three years in the first quarter as the weak homebuying market fueled demand for rentals, according to Reis Inc.
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RealtyTrac has deemed Chicago as the city with the biggest backlog of foreclosed homes among the 20 top metropolitan areas in the nation. More 118,000 homes were either owned by banks or going through the foreclosure process in May.

Real estate experts say the high numbers are due to a number of factors including Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s investigation into bank robo-signing, protections for borrowers built into Illinois law, and the unwillingness by banks to get rid of properties at a lower price than the original mortgage loans taken out for the homes. All of this means that the properties stay in the possession of banks longer, leading to the massive backlog of foreclosed homes in the Chicagoland area.

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Foreign buyers are helping to stoke home sales in U.S. vacation hot spots decimated by the real estate crash, especially in southern Florida.

For the 12 months ending in March, 31% of Florida’s home sales were to foreign buyers, up from 10% in 2007, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors.

In Arizona, 6% of sales in the same period were to foreigners. That was down from 11% last year but still up from 5% in 2007, the data show.

Foreign buyers are being enticed by low U.S. home prices, down 30% nationwide since peaking in 2006, and the weakened dollar, which makes their money go further. Since the start of 2006, the Canadian dollar has soared 18% against the U.S. dollar, while the euro has gained 22%, says data tracker Oanda.

U.S. home prices, meanwhile, have fallen far more than the national average in some places — down 55% from their peaks in Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix and 36% in Los Angeles, says Zillow.com. Those are three of the most popular areas for foreigners searching for real estate on Trulia’s website, that company says.
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Navy Pier, the most popular tourist attraction in Illinois that almost nine million people visited in 2010, is not world-class enough. So says Navy Pier Inc., the non-profit firm that took over the management of the downtown center, with plans to start a $155 million upgrade plan, as well as a boutique hotel.

The new non-profit was created to advocate and manage the attraction for the owner, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority. A board of civic leaders leads Navy Pier Inc., which has taken on the mission of improving the 50-acre site by 2016, its 100-year birthday.

The pier, designed and developed by famous architect David Burnham, has served a number of various functions throughout the years, including as the home of US Navy warships – the reason for the name. The authority took over the pier in 1989, and now the site has almost 270,000 square feet of meeting space, a number of shops and restaurants, an entertainment area featuring a large Ferris wheel, an Imax theater, the Chicago Children’s Museum and more.
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More apartment owners are optimistic about their properties this year, enough to start raising rents, according to a recent survey by credit agency TransUnion. The locally based company released the survey, compiled with 1,252 property managers nationwide, on Friday at the 2011 National Apartment Association Education Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas.

The company surveyed 1,085 small property managers, each with less than 200 units, and 167 large property managers, with more than 200 units. TransUnion performs this survey once a year to check how the managers, and their renters, use the credit services.

Steve Roe, VP of the company’s Rental Screening Business Unit, says that more than two-thirds of all the managers said they are able to easily find tenants in today’s economy, even with raising rents.  “Landlords are much more confident of current occupancy levels,” he tells GlobeSt.com. “This is a big change over a couple of years ago, where they had to do anything to fill apartment units.”
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The family that rented Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home has moved out, officials said.

"We are moving," Rod Halpin’s wife Lori told the Chicago Tribune Thursday. "All I can confirm is that the moving trucks are here."

The Halpin’s lease on Emanuel’s North Side home ends at the end of June. Lori Halpin said the home would be cleaned and turned over to Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff.

Halpin caused a minor controversy last year when he refused to end his lease early after Emanuel announced he would return to Chicago to seek the mayor’s job.

Emanuel’s opponents said he wasn’t eligible to be mayor because he hadn’t lived in Chicago during the months he was Obama’s chief of staff.

The real estate agent who helped Emanuel buy the home said the Halpins wanted $100,000 to end their lease early. Emanuel offered them $5,000 a month for every month they left early.

Halpin stirred the pot further by announcing he, too, would run for mayor but that candidacy ran into problems when questions about his petitions were raised.

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Brian J. Forgas and Lauren V. Forgas bought a four-bedroom, 2.5-bath home at 3 Danada Drive in Wheaton from Michael J. Piscoran and Susan L. Piscoran for $490,000 on May 9.

The Piscorans acquired the property in June 2008. The 3,376-square-foot house was built in 1987 in Seven Gables. It is part of the Danada Farms West subdivision.

Mr. Forgas is a senior counsel at McDonald’s Corporation. He focuses on franchising, energy and sustainability, and real estate.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida and his J.D. from Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America.

According to BlockShopper.com, there have been 519 home sales in Wheaton during the past 12 months, with a median sales price of $280,000.

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CME Group Inc. is looking to sell the landmark Chicago Board of Trade building, following warnings last week that the exchange operator may leave Illinois to avoid a heavy corporate tax burden.

CME has hired Jones Lang LaSalle and Holly Duran Real Estate Partners LLC to market the historic building, which anchors Chicago’s financial district, and aims to arrange a 15-year lease to preserve a spot for its physical trading floors.

"The sale of the Chicago Board of Trade north and south buildings will enable CME Group to continue to reinvest in our core derivatives business while still leasing about 150,000 square feet in the north and south buildings, including the agricultural trading floor," said Jamie Parisi, CME’s chief financial officer, in a statement.

Mr. Parisi reiterated CME’s commitment to "open outcry" trading, which accounted for about 20% of the 3.1 billion futures and options traded on CME’s markets last year.

CME Executive Chairman Terry Duffy last week said he and Mr. Parisi had been examining the possibility of relocating CME’s corporate base outside Illinois, which in January sharply raised the corporate tax rate as part of efforts to put the state’s finances in order.

The 80-year-old Art Deco building was designated a historic landmark in 1978 and is topped by a three-story sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain.

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