Ultrahigh-end homes slow to sell in crowded market

[n2doc]

Don Ciaglia, a long-time builder, built this home in early 2008 and he keeps showing the home but there are no interested buyers. The house at 414 Dana Lane, Barrington Hills, Ill. is currently listed at $5.39 million. (Lane Christiansen, Chicago Tribune / October 16, 2009)

By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Tribune reporter
October 18, 2009

If a man's home is his castle, what happens to the new castle still looking for its man?

In the current economy, it sits and waits.

In Oak Brook, it's a $5.75 million stone castle. In Burr Ridge, it's a Middle Eastern-influenced home named Villa Taj, once priced at $25 million and headed for the auction block next month. In Barrington Hills, it's a nearly 12,000-square-foot home sitting on five acres. In Chicago, it's an unfinished, four-story, bank-owned home with an elevator. And in Lake Forest, it's an elegant country home whose already trimmed price was just slashed by another $1 million.

All are newly constructed, ultrahigh-end homes, reminders of the housing market's headier, healthier days. And all are additions to a market that is bursting with multimillion-dollar homes waiting for that very discriminating buyer with very deep pockets.

"It used to be when we showed a $3 million house, we'd show three or five," said Jaime Adams, a real estate agent with Adams & Myers Realtors, Hinsdale. "Now, you're maybe showing between $2.8 million to $3.6 million or $3.7 million, because you don't know if someone is going to wheel and deal. You're maybe showing 12 or 13. You have such a swing factor."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun-castles-1018-oct18,0,2937682.story

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[tazkcmo]

1. Poor rich people. n/t

[dynasaw]

2. Good!

May the developers and owners who created them eat it. Building those starter palaces was an abomination. Along with Hummers
I hope this over the top mentality is gone for good.

[nightrain]

3. I have little empathy for the conspicuous consumers/sellers

[DaveinJapan]

4. That place has McMansion written all over it.

Five million bucks!?

You can get a similar cookie cutter McMansion for a tenth of the price all over the place these days.

What a joke!

[madokie]

5. The last almost 20 years of my work life I finished concrete

We must have placed and finished the concrete for several hundred of these way too big for common sense homes and I'm sure some of them are on the chopping block now. At the time we all felt we, us finishers, knew that at some point these huge houses would not be worth much in comparisons to a 1500 sq ft homes we were doing very little of. Seems all the houses that were being built around here then were these monstrosities. Many of the places around here don't have natural gas for heat so most of those were having to use propane and let me tell you propane is expensive big time and especially if your heating a house the size of a shopping mall. The last winter we heated with propane cost us three times or more than what it cost to heat using wood pellet now.

[Mari333]

6. damn thats one ugly house

Think of all the beautiful land you could buy with that kind of money, with a teeny home on it. Talk about bad taste..that house is the epitome of bad taste.

huge hulking masthead of a house, its got faux written all over it.

give me the forest anytime. with a little home smack in the middle of the trees.

[KharmaTrain]

7. Lots Of Empty McMansions In Barrington Hills...

That area isn't far from me. Yes, it's filthy rich, but most of it was old money...families that lived in the area for decades. The "noveau" rich started to move in during the 90s building these monsters (most in out of the way, seculded gated communities) that were put up quickly and sold even faster. At first they went for $500k then 1 mil and up and up...riding the real estate bubble all the way. Unlike the poor who were pushed into predatory loans that are now forcing them onto the streets, those in this area used their real estate to gamble with...built up big debts and when the market crashed, they bailed.

There are many communities where these monsters sit...empty and some are falling apart. The banks are swamped with properties they can't sell, even at foreclosure sales, there just aren't many with the big coin around and the banks are hesitant to lend. So the McMansions sit empty.

[n2doc]

8. Of course the key here is "can't sell"- The reality is they don't want to sell them

If they did, they'd run an auction. I'll bet someone would buy them at 500K. Or maybe 200K.

I remember stories about how the huge mansions of the guilded age and the 1920's ended up being sold for pennies after the Depression because no one wanted to live in them. Many were torn down. Only in the last 40 years have the rich come back to reclaim their prizes.


Free market works both ways, folks!