Best Of The Week 1/29
Momen House on 49th, Mixed Use on Pulaski and A Historic Rowhouse on Eugenie Terrace
Here it is! This is what so many of you are asking me to find. Mixed Use, with apartments under 1mil, built out with manageable footage. Unusually attractive facade for a building on Pulaski, a contender for the ugliest avenue in Chicago.
The biggest problem here lies in how to finance this. Conventional loans are difficult when the footage of the commercial section of the building is larger than the residential section which is the case here. I know several lenders that can still put a product together to buy this but the closing costs and carry are no softball like you see in sellable Fannie/Freddie loans. Think higher origination costs, higher interest carry and higher insurance minimum coverage.
Still it’s on Best of the Week right? I can’t tell you how rare a turnkey live-work, or multi-function commercial/residential arrangement like this is. Especially in Avondale/Irving Park at this price point.
One of four houses in this style on 49th street, I’m told that these homes were originally built by Egyptian architect M. Momen as homes for the higher ups in the Nation of Islam. This has been hard to verify but considering the NOI leader lives two doors down from this house in a very similar design, it seems to hold water.
This house has been on and off the market for seemingly an eternity. Yes the design is a bit esoteric and some of the updates aren’t very congruent with the original style of the house but this is still surprising considering the size and location.
The single-family home market in Kenwood is interesting. I’m always struck by how hyper-locational it is. There lies an enormous gulf in median sales price between homes north of 47th st and those south of it. I can understand this, North Kenwood was one of the areas hit hardest by mid-century urban renewal. Although the housing stock here is still beautiful and aspirational there still exist certain blocks where 70% of the land parcels are still vacant, giving an austere and eerie feeling to the pedestrian experience.
It seems amazing but the price of this house is now lower than any new duplex down condo unit nearby. Units where your bedrooms are in the basement and you are still part of an HOA. The fact that this sat on the private market for months and is now live with a $150k price chop reaffirms much of what I think about the Chicago $1mil plus buyer.
People may ooh and ahh at the stained glass or the beautiful wood and brick word on the facade, but when the rubber meets the road, Are they actually going to buy it? Like some of the other properties I wrote about this year, this is one of those situations where the house is priced above what the design-y coolsters that make up a big chunk of my residential buyers can afford and has too many quirks or is outside of the construction scope of what average buyers in this price point want. Chicagoans in the $1.3mish market by and large:
-DONT WANT TO DO WORK
-DONT WANT TO PARK THEIR CAR IN SOME WEIRD EASEMENT PARALLEL OUTDOOR SPACE
-WANT 21ST CENTURY LAYOUTS WITH OPEN-CONCEPT KITCHENS
-WANT ALL THE BEDROOMS ON ONE LEVEL
Chicagoans are a pragmatic bunch and when we have so many functional housing options at this price point who wants the headache(besides me)?
Wish I had $1.3 mil for that place