Price cuts, arbitrary teardowns mark North Shore ultra-luxury market

Baird & Warner agent Laura Rubin Dresner shot for just under $12 million when she landed a Glencoe mansion listing last April. Three months later, the price was chopped 19 percent.

More recently, a Winnetka mansion owned by David H. Hoffmann, chairman of the company that’s Winnetka’s largest landlord with 26 downtown commercial properties, also decreased its asking price to $8 million in recent weeks, down $1 million from the original ask made in October.

They’re far from the only high-end listings on the North Shore to see price cuts, as agents respond to pressures in the ultra-luxury market.

An increasing number of buyers with specific tastes are viewing luxury homes as teardowns, willing to pay millions of dollars for the dirt and scrap the house, said Rubin Dresner, who declined to comment specifically on the Glencoe listing, at 595 Longwood Avenue, while speaking to the trend.

“There are buyers out there in the high-end market who are looking to purchase homes, beautiful homes, ultimately to tear them down because the land is so desirable,” she said.

That can be a “hard pill for sellers to swallow,” but these sales can still be lucrative and mutually desirable, she said, especially if the seller has owned the home for a long time and still stands to make a profit.

Typically, these kinds of buyers would look for undeveloped land or land that is “not in its highest functional use,” but there is a shortage of that in the most coveted areas of the North Shore, she said.

As a result, buyers are “paying up, knowing that they’re not going to be able to pay the price of a teardown because there’s a gorgeous home on it,” she said.

Very motivated sellers are willing to drop their prices, she said.

“But if the seller has staying power and is utilizing the home and enjoying it, then they’re not as negotiable,” Rubin Dresner said.

Just down the road from Rubin Dresner’s Glencoe listing, a seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion, at 585 Longwood, has yet to cut its asking price of $9.8 million and has been sitting on the market since May 2022. A Lake Forest mansion, at 530 South Ridge Road, had its price cut by $500,000 on Monday after being listed by @properties Christie’s International Real Estate’s Andra O’Neill in September.

Hoffmann’s Winnetka estate, at 44 Locust Road, has a whopping nine bedrooms and nine bathrooms, and spans roughly 9,700 square feet on 3.25 acres. The home was built in 1931 with a remodel in 2010, and was listed for nearly $9 million in 2010 but got taken off the market, until this past October, when it was re-listed for just under that price, according to MLS data.

O’Neill listed another Lake Forest Mansion, 1460 Lake Road, originally at $8 million, and it took its second price cut in July of last year — this time a 13 percent drop for a new asking price of $6.5 million.

Yet it’s a different story for the market just below the ultra-luxury segment. In the North Shore’s $2 million range, “the demand is greater than the inventory and the supply right now,” said O’Neill, who declined to comment specifically on her Lake Forest listings.

“And the high-end market, maybe it’s a little more in line, but I expect we’ll have a pretty good year. I think it’s going to be a really solid market,” she said.

Still, these shifts have not been lost on agents like Rubin Dresner who look to the North Shore lakefront as a driver of Chicagoland’s ultra-luxury market. She agreed price cuts have been isolated to the higher end of the market while there’s a “tremendous shortage” of properties at slightly lower price points.

“And what I’ve seen there is that a lot of people who are empty nesters that would normally be selling their home are staying in their home,” Rubin Dresner said.

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