Page 2 - Crains High-end homes sold like crazy last year. The market's even hotter this year. 6.9.22

“I think there is some trepidation” among high-end buyers, Sachs Wong said. “Interest rate
hikes and the declining stock market made people feel less comfortable, but they’re still
buying.”

In the market overall, homes of all prices, sales are down from the record-busting volume of
2021, though they're still running well ahead of previous years.

Of the 54 Chicago and suburban sales at $4 million-plus so far in 2022, the top six are
downtown condos, continuing the paradox that while the downtown condo market overall is a
weak spot because of crime and the slow return from COVID, the upper end is setting
records.

At the upper end, this year’s penthouse sales are looking like 2019, the last year of normality,
when nine of the 10 highest-priced home sales of the year were in downtown condos.

The second-largest number of sales is in Winnetka, where a dozen homes have sold at $4
million or more so far in 2022, compared with nine in all of 2021. The highest-priced among
them is a lakefront home on Whitebridge Hill Road with about 100 feet of Lake Michigan
Beach. It sold in March for $6.3 million, slightly over the asking price.

Thanks in large part to the COVID era igniting families’ desire for more space indoors and out,
“there’s been a renewed awareness of the North Shore,” said Nancy Nugent, a Jameson
Sotheby’s International Realty agent. She represented buyers who paid $4.05 million on June
3 for a Lake Bluff house, nearly 16,000 square feet on over 4 acres, with an indoor pool and a
stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline whose length wasn’t specified in the listing.

The property had previously been under contract to a buyer, but when that contract fell apart,
it came back on the market Feb. 14 and went under contract to Nugent’s clients the same
day.

This year’s upper-end buyers, Nugent said, “jump when something good becomes available.”
Most of them, she said, “don’t have to buy—they want to buy, so they’ll wait for the right one.”

Janet Owen has experienced the upper-end buyers’ eagerness firsthand. A Berkshire
Hathaway HomeServices Chicago agent, she said that several months ago she was still
quietly prepping a client’s mansion on Orchard Street in Lincoln Park before putting it on the
market when another agent noticed her and a photographer in the yard.

“She asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’ and the secret was out,” Owen said this week. The
8,400-square-foot home on a 65-by-125-foot lot sold in February for $8.65 million, one of three
$8 million-plus city homes that sold that week without ever going on the market.

“The appetite, I would say, is voracious,” Owen said, “and I don’t see it slowing down.”