I had a quiet chuckle at this story:
A home that was featured in a 2010s hit TV show finally sold after a massive price cut and 12 years on the market.
The Barrington Hills home in Illinois sold for $6.5million on April 25 after spending more than a decade on the market.
But it wasn’t that the home – that was featured in all six seasons of Empire that ran from 2015 – wasn’t beautiful or wasn’t in a good, very secluded area, it was simply the price point.
The home originally tried to sell for $15.9million in 2013, before dropping to $12.5million in 2016.
‘This price point is very difficult to sell in Illinois, period,’ said agent Michael LaFido. ‘It’s not like Florida, it’s not like California where they’re having $10[million] to $20million [homes].’
LaFido said only a ‘handful’ of homes priced at $6.5million and above are sold each year.
Yeah. In Illinois, maybe that’s true. Let’s be honest: who would want to live in the People’s Soviet of Illinois, a state run by Fatboi Pritzker? Only people who’ve lived there all their lives — and I see that the house was eventually purchased by someone local. Nobody with any kind of wealth is moving to Illinois, after all — in fact, the reverse is true, and Fatboi’s mismanagement of the state, its sky-high taxes, sky-high crime rates and all the other Blue State blues are causing wealthy people to flee Illinois rather than move there.
So you have a shrinking pool of prospective buyers, the area is not close to Chicago — Barrington Hills is over 40 miles away from the Loop — and the house was overpriced for that market to start off with.
Compare and contrast that with this house here in Plano.
(more pics below the fold, if you don’t want to follow the link)
Nice, not as pretentious — none of that faux-baronial stuff — same kind of acreage as the Barrington house…
…but it sold within 11 hours of its initial listing.
I mean, if you’re going to spend that kind of money and had a choice of location, would you rather live in north Texas, or northern Illinois?
I grew up 2 towns east of there from the 70’s through the mid-90’s and it was always “Inverness is for the rich, Barrington Hills is for the super-rich.” My family had some friends in Inverness so we’d visit that town from time to time, but we never had any reason to keep going farther to BH.
And even with that, yeah, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend $16 million on any home in BH. I think it was just the sellers trying to capitalize on the fame from the tv show, rather than actually pricing it for the town.
For grins, I just looked it up on ye olde google maps and BH looks like a forest preserve compared to every town around it, even Inverness. Considering all lots in Inverness were a minimum of 3 acres and they didn’t allow fences so they could have an “open, country estate feel” BH must be that but even moreso.
For a few years, I lived in the next town over from Inverness — Palatine — and always liked the large properties and winding wooded roads of our wealthy neighbors. But there’s no way I would ever been able to justify the cost of the houses to myself, even back then in the late 1980s.
‘I mean, if you’re going to spend that kind of money ……………………………
Find yourself an architect and a piece of land sized to YOUR desires / needs and
get what YOU want in a house / land !!
You wouldn’t pay 4 figures for someone else’s tailor made suit would you ??
Why would you spend 4000 times that amount on something that was someone else’s
‘dream’.
Buying preexisting houses in those price ranges has never made sense to me !
Lake Geneva Wi, one of the hottest real estate markets in the Midwest had 29 homes over $5mil sell last year with 5 over $10 mill. That is a large number to crack, even Jordan’s place had to come down to around $9 mil after 12 years on the market and $20 mil lower than first ask.
All that money for a house and you can still see neighbors from your yard? That right that is crazy