To the casual observer, the house that Perry Bigelow is about to build on Lot 5061 at HomeTown Aurora wouldn’t seem much different from the 900 others his company plans to build at the subdivision.
And really, it won’t be much different. When completed, the Village Hall plan will have about 1,450 square feet of space, with three bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths and the wraparound front porch that is something of a trademark in the Bigelow Homes communities.
But the builder sees the house as a potential lifeline to thousands of people, the “seed money” for fledgling entrepreneurs in developing nations.
Bigelow is building a “House of Hope,” which is a fund-raising effort for Hope International, a Pennsylvania-based charity that makes “micro loans” in Eastern Europe and Asia. The organization lends $100 to $500 to local entrepreneurs to fund such businesses as vegetable-market stands or crafts or to buy livestock. Bigelow says the repayment rate is high — 97 per cent — and those funds in turn are reinvested in other entrepreneurs.
Bigelow estimates that when his company’s House of Hope is sold this fall, about $150,000 of the $175,000 to $180,000 estimated sale price will go to Hope International. Bigelow is donating the land, his company’s costs and all profits; many of the home’s suppliers and subcontractors are donating labor, building materials or both.
He explained that he has long been a supporter of Opportunity International, another “micro loan” charity, so he was familiar with the concept of this newer group, which was founded by another builder, Jeff Rutt of Lancaster, Pa. Rutt’s company builds three houses a year for the program, and several others have been built in Minnesota, but Bigelow says he’s the first in the Chicago area — though he’d welcome other builders to jump in.
“On the average, you get 1.3 to 1.5 jobs created per $500 loan,” Bigelow explains. “But that’s not the end of it. There are usually six to seven people dependent on that job. That’s a lot of leverage. That’s why I am in love with this program.”
Who gets the commission?
The National Association of Realtors apparently has decided to take its own advice and stop renting.
The trade group announced it plans to build a 12-story building in Washington for an estimated $45 million.
When complete, it will house the NAR’s Washington offices, saving what the group says is about $500,000 annually in rent. The Chicago-based organization also plans to make the building a “green” one, with photo-voltaic solar panels on the roof, a water-recycling system, and other environmentally friendly features.
It will be lobbyist-friendly, too, with an address about three blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Leave your wallet in San Francisco
I keep tabs on the San Francisco Bay-area real estate market, just as a sanity benchmark. The next time I find myself muttering that Chicago housing prices have gone crazy, I will be reminded that in April, the median price (that is, half sold for more, half for less) in the nine-county Bay Area was $402,000. That’s a monumental leap: It hit $386,000 (a record) in March 2001, settled down to about $370,000 for most of the rest of the year, then exploded at year-end, according to DataQuick, a real estate information service.
The median price in the Chicago metropolitan area in the first quarter of 2002 was $190,000, according to the Illinois Association of Realtors.
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Read past Mary Umberger columns at CHICAGOTRIBUNE.COM/HOMES
