Former Bears quarterback Erik Kramer has sold his single-family house in the Sanctuary development in north suburban Lake Bluff for $360,000.
Kramer, who was released by the Bears before last season started and later signed by the San Diego Chargers, bought the property in March 1999 in a private transaction for $320,000. He clearly liked the neighborhood, because he rented a single-family home in the Sanctuary before going forward with his purchase. The nine-room home that Kramer sold has four bedrooms.
Kramer and his wife, Marshawn, continue to own properties north of Los Angeles in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where they paid $500,000 for a place in 1998, in Oak Park, Calif. and in Agoura, Calif.
No other information was available about the Lake Bluff house, which Kramer sold privately.
– Marc Ewing, who purchased the highest-priced single-family home in Cook County in 1999 — a Glencoe mansion that he bought for $6.95 million — has been doing some other buying and selling of late.
The New York Observer reports that the 30-year-old Ewing, who co-founded the software company Red Hat Inc., recently placed a 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on the market for $9.3 million after buying it in December for $7.9 million. Ewing, a billionaire, has watched his company’s stock plummet in value by more than 80 percent. Red Hat develops and sells the Linux operating system.
Although Ewing ultimately was approved by the co-op board of the Manhattan building at 1120 Fifth Ave. — where actor Michael J. Fox owns a unit — the paper reports that the board’s three months of “scrutiny” centered around fears that the couple’s net worth was “tied up in stocks” and “perhaps that the couple would likely use the apartment as a pied-a-terre.”
Late last year, Ewing, who also has a home in Durham, N.C., bought the famed, 22-room Pabst mansion at 443 Sheridan Rd. in Glencoe, which had been listed for as much as $9.5 million.
– The June issue of Worth magazine identifies the country’s 250 “richest towns” by median home sale in 1998 and 1999, and raises a few questions.
Namely, where are Oak Brook and Mettawa?
The DuPage County village regularly shows up in local surveys as one of the wealthiest Chicago-area suburbs. And the Lake County enclave of Mettawa, where TV documentarian Bill Kurtis has a weekend home, where the late Bob Collins owned a home and where singer-songwriter Richard Marx owned a house until last year, was shut out of Worth’s rankings, as were several other Chicago-area communities that should have made the cut.
It’s understandable that communities with larger populations might statistically be left out, even though Worth’s “median home price” was limited to single-family homes. But for Worth to omit Oak Brook (pop. 9,000) and tiny Mettawa (pop. 350) makes no sense at all.
The ranked Chicago-area communities were Kenilworth (No. 57), with a median home value of $722,500; Bannockburn (63), $692,500; Winnetka (70), $675,000; North Barrington (74), $656,500; Lake Forest (94), $615,000; South Barrington (111), $582,000; Glencoe (131), $544,500; Long Grove (138), $530,750; Barrington Hills (140), $530,000; Hinsdale (183), $469,000; Lake Barrington (188), $469,000; Riverwoods (196), $450,000; Burr Ridge (201), $445,000; Wilmette (204), $445,000; Inverness (206), $439,000; Kildeer (207), $438,750; and Lincolnshire (239), $389,090.
The top-rated U.S. community was Jupiter Island, Fla. (pop. 600), with a median home price of $1.9 million, while Aspen, Colo., ranked second with a median price of $1.75 million.
Incidentally, Marx sold a 10-room, four-bedroom, 3,707-square-foot Tudor on 9.6 acres on Little St. Mary’s Road in Mettawa last summer for $1.125 million. Marx sold the property, which has a six-stall stable, riding arena and three pastures, because he moved to Lake Bluff in 1997.
Update: Former Bull Brent Barry’s East Lake Shore Drive condominium, featured here on March 5 and most recently listed for $1.9 million, has sold, at a loss, for $1.4975 million, according to public records.
Barry paid $1.675 million for the condo at 189 E. Lake Shore Dr., in March 1999. The three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot unit has a two-car garage space, a more than 500-square-foot living room and a fireplace. The buyers were a couple from Deerfield.
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Have a tip about a home sale or a piece of property being put on the market that involved a well-known Chicagoan or a well-known piece of Chicago real estate? Write to Upper Bracket, c/o Chicago Tribune, Real Estate section, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. E-mail: rgoldsbo@enteract.com
