Astor Street House that Originally Sought $9M Cut to $4M

A growing urge to make a deal struck the owners of an Astor Street mansion in the Gold Coast that’s been for sale for years, resulting in another significant concession on the property.

The owner of the 9,300-square-foot home at 1421 North Astor is seeking $4 million after $1 million was slashed from its listing price this week — taking it down to less than half of its original asking price of nearly $9 million when it hit the market in 2018.

The home was built in 1892 and has seven bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, and was once the home of a Catholic Missionary Order. It’s unclear who the current owner is, as Cook County Property Records list the owner as a land title company.

The property is on Chicago’s historic Astor Street in the Gold Coast, with homes designed during the 19th century by wealthy Chicagoans.

Katherine Malkin, a broker with Compass, is representing the sellers. She said they cut the price because the home has been on the market for a long time and the sellers are very motivated.

According to the home’s public listing, it has been for sale since at least 2018, when it was listed for $8.95 million. Subsequent price cuts brought the home down to $5.25 million before this week’s drop to $4 million.

The price cuts follow a similar pattern of another nearby home, which eventually sold for $7 million despite seeking $13.5 million when it was originally listed two years ago. That 10,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts style mansion at 15 West Burton Place was the first to sell in the Gold Coast for over $7 million since 2017.

Despite the mansions in the historic Astor District, single-family homes are generally an outlier in the Gold Coast, where mansions are rare and condos are more common than standalone homes.

Still, even much newer construction of luxury housing in the pricey neighborhood tends to experience price cuts from steep listings before selling, as evidenced by an October reduction on a Scott Street mansion built in 2010 to $8.75 million, a move that brought it down 13 percent from its initial asking price of $10.1 million when it hit the market in October 2021.

At the top of the market, setting a listing price is more complex because there are fewer comparable sales than for lower priced properties. Even in near-record deals, such as the $20 million sale of the penthouse at Trump Tower Chicago, the listing price was $10 million more than the final sale.