The Howe Street property went for $11.9 million, the most anyone has paid for a home here since another mansion two blocks away went for the same price 29 months ago.
A Lincoln Park mansion sold this morning for $11.9 million, the highest sale price recorded for a Chicago home since August 2018.
The sale of the 12,000-square-foot mansion on a double lot on Howe Street, which was not openly listed for sale, is the highest-priced purchase of a single residential property in the Chicago area in 2020. But a situation in Winnetka, where the Chicago Tribune has reported that three different multimillion-dollar mansions may have been bought by a single entity, prevents the Howe Street mansion from taking this year’s crown at the moment.
The sellers on Howe Street, William and Sandra Sterling, could not be reached for comment. The agent who represented them, Tim Salm of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty, declined to comment, as did the buyer’s agent, Phil Skowron of @properties. The buyers are not yet identified in public records.
The Sterlings’ asking price for the six-bedroom house was $14.5 million. They sold for 18 percent less than that.
William Sterling is the managing partner of Sandia Point, a quantitative research and trading firm with offices in Chicago and New York.
In 2013, the Sterlings paid $3.95 million for the land the house is built on. There is no public record of what they spent to build the house.
No photos of the interior of the home are available, and neither are details such as a bedroom count.
Built by BGD&C, a firm that has built several of the multi-lot mansions in the section of Lincoln Park south of Armitage, the house, according to marketing information from Salm, has “grand living and dining rooms which open onto south terrace. Beautiful stone and wide plank hardwood flooring throughout. Jaw-dropping sculptural staircase topped by skylight and one-of-a-kind chandelier.”
The $11.9 million sale price is the highest in the city since buyers paid the same amount in August 2018 for a mansion two blocks west on Burling Street. That one was also built by BGD&C.
In 2019, the highest anyone was recorded paying for a Chicago-area home was $11.3 million.
Until this sale on Howe, the highest sale price for a Chicago-area home in 2020 was $9.5 million, which a buyer paid in October for a lakefront mansion in Winnetka. The purchaser, according to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, was a land trust that obscures the buyer’s name. The Chicago Tribune has reported that the buyer is also behind the purchases of two other mansions, one that went for $8.2 million in July, and another that went for $6.2 million in November. The total, $23.9 million, would be for the land alone, minus some swapped out to the local park district, and a single house would be built on the site, according to the Tribune.
Crain’s could not independently confirm that all three properties have one purchaser, as public records do not yet show a buyer in two of the transactions.
