Dreaming of Your Own Turret? A 2-Bedroom at 1170 W. Armitage in Lincoln Park
This 2-bedroom at 1170 W. Armitage in Lincoln Park came on the market in early September 2015.
It is in turreted part of the building.
It has 10-foot ceilings, custom built-ins and a wood-burning fireplace.
The kitchen has dark cabinets, a breakfast bar, stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops.
The unit has a master suite where the bathroom has a walk-in body shower.
There’s central air and washer/dryer in the unit.
A deeded parking spot is including in the price at 1122 W. Armitage.
This property recently reduced $9,000 to $510,000.
Properties near the Armitage brown line stop and its shops and restaurants are getting a premium.
Will this unit get it too?
Cathy Ivcich at @Properties has the listing. See the pictures here.
Unit #2W: 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1450 square feet
- Sold in June 1994 for $205,000
- Sold in December 2010 for $290,000
- Originally listed in September 2015 for $519,000
- Reduced
- Currently listed at $510,000
- Assessments of $289 a month (includes water, exterior maintenance, scavenger, snow removal)
- Taxes of $5463
- Central Air
- Washer/Dryer in the unit
- Deeded parking included in the price at 1122 W. Armitage
- Wood-burning fireplace
- Bedroom #1: 17×12
- Bedroom #2: 14×12
Delusional seller. In what world has there been a 79% price appreciation since December 2010? This is going to need to be reduced a LOT more to ever sell.
The seller’s purchase price is irrelevant to current market value. They could have bought it as a short sale or foreclosure. Maybe they did all the renovation work.
The price doesn’t seem significantly out of line for a nicely done 2/2 in that area.
The place looks cramped. Maybe it’s the furniture and the weird overhanging kitchen cabinets. (Either open the kitchen up or make it a galley kitchen. I hate the in between kitchens where it’s trying to be open, but also a galley.)
There are also no bathtubs in this unit, which could be a turn off for many buyers.
Lastly, while the turrets are cool, but exposed fire escape and store fronts are not cool.
“Delusional seller. In what world has there been a 79% price appreciation since December 2010?”
I made over 80% on one of my purchases from 2012. I sold in 2014. Would be up over 100% in today’s market.
If the seller’s purchase price mattered, then mortgage lenders would never require an appraisal for a refinance or purchase of a property.
Only time seller’s think their purchase price matters is when they refinance and the value comes in lower than they anticipated then all of a sudden the previous purchase price is an anchor.
On the flip side, when the market is declining, the same people saying the seller’s purchase price matters will be the first folks in line making low balling offers.
Can’t have it both ways.
While the previous purchase price can warrant investigation as to why such an increase is warranted, it is totally irrelevant to the present day value.
“They could have bought it as a short sale or foreclosure. Maybe they did all the renovation work.”
3W sold for $474k in ’08 (listing sez it was ‘Beautiful[ly] Renovated’), so this one, in ’10, was unrenovated, distressed, or both.
https://www.urbanrealestate.com/property/1170-W-Armitage-Unit-3W-CHICAGO-IL-60614-HZGVDMM5LPLAM.html
looking at the prior listing, at the very least, they updated the kitchen and most likely the bathrooms.
home design 101…curtains should go to the floor. fail.
I’m not a fan of the see-through kitchen cabinets (as some of you uprobably know) in fact I hate them…
The whole renovation looks ‘off’ home depot special is my guess, can’t quite tell without seeing in person
The kitchen has a trifecta of annoyances:
-See-through cabinets
-Weird open space below the cabinets
-Flooring that differs from the rest of the house but without a threshold/doorway to help make sense of the flooring change
Yeah, this condo is a fail. $200k tops and then gut it.
“Flooring that differs from the rest of the house”
I, for one, am sick of hardwood floors in the kitchen. Next time, I’m going with tile but agree that the transition to the rest of the house has to look good. Going to study the issue.
This unit is perfect for 2 ex-sorrority girls to inhabit, it’s prime GZ-within-GZ location is key. Some rich dad should buy this and be happy his daughter isn’t living near Wicker Park.
“I, for one, am sick of hardwood floors in the kitchen. Next time, I’m going with tile but agree that the transition to the rest of the house has to look good. ”
I’ve got hardwoods in my kitchen and I would never do tile. For starters, I’m a bit clumsy and I drop stuff all the time walking around the kitchen; with hardwoods usually nothing happens to the wood, or maybe a little dent; but with tile, they would most assuredly crack.
Secondly, grout. I hate grout with tile. It gets dirty and is next to impossible to clean; mopping especially, spreading around dirty water into the grout and makes it look dirty.
Third, my kitchen is an open floor plan with my dining and living rooms. It would look weird to have tile in the kitchen but hardwoods throughout.
Finally, if I had to do tile, I’d almost rather do that .79 cents a sq ft vinyl roll that look like tile. Easy to clean, easy to install, and cheap. No grout or damaged tiles either.
I agree with HD. The grout issue really kills tile for me. I also don’t like the look of squares or small rectangles on the floor. I prefer the large plank look of hardwoods.
Good point on the grout.
“This unit is perfect for 2 ex-sorrority girls to inhabit, it’s prime GZ-within-GZ location is key. Some rich dad should buy this and be happy his daughter isn’t living near Wicker Park.”
Wicker Park is the preferred neighborhood now. All the hot restaurants are over there on Division Street and up into Bucktown at North/Milwaukee and Damen. I predict prices in Bucktown/Wicker Park will surpass LP and Lakeview- for condos- soon. There is absolutely NO inventory in that entire area. And anything that does come on the market sells almost right away. It’s insane.
Aren’t rents already higher than LP now?
The retail in LP is lame compared to Bucktown/Wicker Park now. Armitage looks deserted and the remaining shops seem to be targeted at an older crowd. Bucktown always seems to be buzzing. Seems like all the shops there now are the same ones you can find in Soho in NYC.
The vibes of the LP and BT/WP couldn’t be more different.
“Wicker Park is the preferred neighborhood now.”
No chance. The park itself is not safe, overrun with “vibrant” fellow citizens, homeless, drug dealing, and it has robberies. It’s not comparable to Halsted and Armitage.
I’m not talking about your typical Chicago woman, when I said “sorority girls”. I’m talking about the girl from real money, who will live in the GZ-within-GZ, then get married and end up in a $2.0+ million house and be in a country-club and take kids on spring break trips like Turks & Caicos and skiing etc . These people, like F Scott Fitzgerald said, are “very different from you and me”, and like Tom Wolfe alluded to in Bonfire: “you almost never see or meet them” they wear “Sea Island cotton” lol They ain’t going to be living near Division and Damen or Chicago and Wood.
Now, on the other hand, you have the rest of the Chicago women, who move into their apartments and condos, who aren’t at all connected to anything and the majority ain’t going anywhere. They takes their cues from the mass media, live the “Sex in the City lifestyle”, get pumped-and-dumped numerous times from Tinder dudes, they work their lives off oin cubicles for corporate bosses doing meaningless stuff, like holding conference calls and meetings, etc. They waste their prime years living like this, they age, hit 32 (called hitting-the-wall) when their looks start really going downhill. They panic due to this, plus the clock ticking, and then they panic and start looking around for a stable guy who will pay the bills and, like a sucker, not care about their carousel-riding timder promiscuity. They end up despising these wimpy guys about 5- 7 years later, and then they just get fat. They hope to get a house in LaGrange or Wilmette, at this point, and many will fail.
This Wicker Park girl is a far cry from what I was talking about.
PS I see the people who ride the Red, Brown, and Blue lines and by far the Milwaukee corridor has the least attractive women. I also had a 9:00 am. doctor appt, recently on Clark Street in LP. So, I had time to kill I drove around to see the Wrigley construction and around LP near 2520 Lakeview, etc. The girls commuting and waiting for buses etc. around LP are better looking and more fastidious in appearance, etc. by far than what you see in the Milwaukee Ave corridor, the hipster hwy.
Bucktown retail on Damen has alot of turnover too.
“Bucktown retail on Damen has alot of turnover too.”
Only recently. All of those small boutiques (that you’d probably see in LP) have closed for more on trend retailers.
“The retail in LP is lame compared to Bucktown/Wicker Park now”
Totally agree. The only retailer i’m surprised opened up in LP instead of Buck/WP is Warby Parker. Perhaps they got a good deal on rent.
Why do people prefer Bucktown/Wicker Park to Lincoln Park?
Jenny, I think BT/WP has more character. LP is kind of sterile. Both are nice areas, but I think attract different kinds of people. LP is more conservative, whereas BT/WP might be viewed as more edgy.
“BT/WP might be viewed as more edgy”
…by the tightwads in LP. It’s “edgy” like a $10m SoHo loft–30 years ago, it wasn’t someplace you’d hang out.
LOL at Wicker Park is the preferred neighborhood now. Maybe if you’re 25 and, like, clueless. Seriously, who in 2015 buys for proximity to retail, that’s quite possibly behind schools for me in priority and I don’t even have kids…
LP is still the premiere areas for moneyed folk but IMHO the desirability factor transitioned to WP for a number of reasons including:
1. LP priced itself out the market for younger generations. The cheap three flats were converted to SFH or just torn down for some mcmansions or expensive new condos;
2. There are more options for people these days to live in the city. Years ago it was a handful of neighborhoods along the lake, but now hipness and desirability extends pretty far long along the entire NW corridor;
3. There seems to be fewer frat type people in the younger generations these days, which seemed to be the major draw to LP in the first place (LP is like bloomington, Champaign and Madison all put together in one place!); I may be wrong about this observation, but 20 years ago the vast majority of college kids were preppy frat (Champaign was so greek biased that if you didn’t rush, you had social life issues), and it seems that drunken frat boy/girl lifestyle has diminished somewhat as upper middle class white kids represent a decreasingly smaller % of the younger population.
People are saying the LP and WP are priced similarly with WP starting to surpass LP. LP seems much more desirable to me. The housing stock is nicer and you can walk to the zoo and lake. WP still has an industrial feel to it.
The idea what SP and LP are similarly priced is true in a handful of cases but not necessarily true and if so, it’s only a recent phenomena that will correct itself with the next market decline. Youre absolutely right though, the park, zoo, lake, and distance from ‘bad areas’ is high enough that it will command higher values in the long term. Location, location, location.
“LOL at Wicker Park is the preferred neighborhood now. Maybe if you’re 25 and, like, clueless.”
Sid V – you really need to get out more. BT/WP is filled with families. Take a stroll though the side streets and ask yourself who owns all those SFH. Much less multi-unit buildings then in LP which are filled with young renters.
“BT/WP is filled with families.” …..who move to the suburbs shortly after enrolling in CPS elementary schools. My suburb is filled with former city transplants. Nearly every family I meet is a city transplant.
Bucktown/WP along Wabansia and Hoyne has some magnificent SFHs. The stretch of the “on trend” (learned a new term) boutiques is only about 2 blocks north of North Ave on Damen. I wonder if the stores are even profitable. There’s not that many people ever in them. The most telling feature about WP/Buck versus Halsted/Armitage is the low quality of people you actually see at the Damen/North/Milw intersection. It’s still pretty scummy. And kids? They don’t fit in over there, with the head shops, Double Door and even the dyke wenches that work at Stan’s Donuts don’t like kids or healthy/normal families, and they sell donuts for chrissakes!
I’d love to know what Helmut looks like and if he is married/has kids.
Jenny,
his moniker is a play off the name of a gay 26 year old german who killed his older lover’s wife in Willette in the 90’s. That tells you all you need to know.
My moniker comes from two keys that are next to each other on my keyboard. Home and Delete.
Kind of like Homer Simpson pressing TAB for a soda and CTRL as ca-tarl-l
https://vimeo.com/37714632
Ohhh… I had no idea about his screen name. How awful.
HD, I always thought your screen name was perfect for this site.
homedelete does have the added benefit of being perfect for this site too!
“People are saying the LP and WP are priced similarly with WP starting to surpass LP.”
Remember, anonny would ONLY live by Lincoln Park because it was the ONLY decent place in all of the Midwest to live or else you might as well be in Cincinnati.
Apparently, according to Crain’s some buyers, with their $4.8 million budget, thought otherwise. Apparently, the Lake is no longer the deciding factor.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/realestate/20151001/CRED0701/150939983/new-bucktown-house-sells-for-4-8-million
“A pair of technology executives paid more than $4.8 million for a new home in Bucktown.
It’s the second sale for over $4 million this year on Wolcott Avenue. One block north, a 7,600-square-footer sold in June for $4.2 million.
According to the records of Midwest Real Estate Data, the previous record price for a publicly listed home in Bucktown was $3.7 million, paid in April 2014 by a buyer who turned around and sold the home for less than $3.6 million five months later.”
Marco I get out just fine-many of those families settled because they were priced out of their first choice neighborhoods. WP/Bucktowm isn’t awful, just very average, for me it will never be something to aspire to.
Sold for $482 in December.