Illinois Realtor Group Admits They Overstated Chicago Home Prices

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The Illinois Association of Realtors, the state's largest real estate trade association, fessed up Monday to grossly overstating the median selling price for homes in Chicago in monthly reports dating as far as three years back.

The errors, they claim, were not intentional, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, but were due instead to a data processing mistake. While they initially admitted they had erred in their May report, they also say their monthly reports over the last three years, since they originally began reporting Chicago-specific data in February 2008, may also be inaccurate.

In a statement released Monday on their website, the association said their reported May 2011 median home sale price -- $299,000, a 10.3 percent increase over the same month the previous year -- was approximately $50,000 too high. After correcting for their data input error, the median sales price in May was said to be $249,000, 23 percent lower than the same month the previous year.

In their report, issued last month, the association had lauded the sales figures -- which they said to be part of a four-month rise in home sale prices statewide -- as "all good signs for a market working to recover amid lackluster job creation and a restrictive lending environment."

The discrepancy reportedly came to light after the Chicago Tribune, acting on a tip, questioned the association's most recent report on median home sale prices.

Despite the Chicago reporting errors, their statement indicates they are standing by their previous assertions of a statewide upswing in home sale prices.

Chelsea Townhouse With Giant Living Room POOL

The Wall Street Journal caught up with Evelyn McMurray Van-Zeller, who lives in a townhouse on West 15th. It's a huge space, sure, and in a fabulous neighborhood, but what makes it unique is the thing that inhabits most of the living room space -- a ginormous swimming pool.

The 30,000-gallon pool was a fixture of the home when Ms. McMurray Van-Zeller's brother, a bachelor, lived there. She inherited the home from her brother after he passed away in 1995.

"This is definitely a trophy, bragging-rights property," admitted the owner.

From the Journal:

The renovated townhouse is split into a triplex with two apartments on the top floors that rent for $4,000 and $5,000, respectively. The entire townhouse has six bedrooms, five bathrooms and a garden with a small pool--this one for the owner's turtles. There are also five fireplaces, including one in each of the rental apartments.

The house is currently on the market for just under $11 million.

Home Ownership Woes Suggest Trouble For The American Dream

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Home ownership, long a central pillar of the American dream, seems increasingly unattainable for growing numbers of households.

Yet old views died hard, and nine out of 10 Americans still consider home ownership “an important part of the American dream," according to a June poll by The New York Times/CBS News.

Indeed, there are signs of slight improvement in the housing market. In June, work started on 629,000 new houses, a five-month high that beat economists’ expectations saw an uptick in construction in every region in the country. But that doesn’t necessarily indicate the housing market is in recovery -- because, as real estate analyst Mike Larson recently told The Washington Post, “[p]eople who don’t have jobs don’t buy houses.”

And many, many people don’t have jobs. Unemployment rose to 9.2 percent in June, a figure that would actually be higher than 11 percent if there were still as many people actively looking for work as there were at the start of the recession, according to the Wall Street Journal. Among those who have jobs, wages are falling and many people can only find part-time work rather than full-time.

The grim employment situation is reflected in home ownership statistics. On Wednesday, Morgan Stanley released a report showing that if delinquent borrowers are excluded, the U.S. home ownership rate is only 59.7 percent, which would be an all-time low. Leaving in the country’s roughly 7.5 million delinquent borrowers, home ownership is at 66.4 percent.

Morgan Stanley housing strategist Oliver Chang told Bloomberg that given runaway foreclosures and tight credit for borrowers, America is moving “away from being an ownership society” -- President George W. Bush’s vision of a country with high home ownership -- and “towards becoming a rentership society.”

Former Goebbels Property For Sale In Berlin

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BERLIN — A posh island property on a Berlin lake where Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, lived for almost a decade and held lavish parties with Nazi bigwigs is up for sale at auction.

Bids are now being taken for the 70,000-square foot (6,440-square meter) plot on Schwanenwerder island, an exclusive area in western Berlin where Goebbels and his family lived from 1936 to 1943.

There is no minimum bid for the property, which has 272 feet (83 meters) of waterfront around the corner from Berlin's popular Wannsee lake beach, and is dotted with tall oaks, pines and other trees.

"The market will decide what it sells for," Irina Daehne, a spokeswoman for the real estate agency selling the property for the city, said Wednesday.

Berlin reserves the right, however, to decide not to sell if the bids are too low – or to reject the top bidder if it turns out they are somehow interested in glorifying the Goebbels past.

"We want to avoid a Nazi use or anything related," Daehne said. "We can say no and we will say no; nobody wants the right-wing scene there."

Schwanenwerder island was first developed at the end of the 19th century, and quickly became home for some of Berlin's wealthiest families – many of them Jewish.

Shortly after the Nazis came to power in March 1933, the local chapter of the brown-shirted SA stormtroopers raised a swastika flag atop a water tower on the island to intimidate the Jewish residents.

Richard Neutra's Kronish House gets a reprieve

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Bowing to community pressure, the owners of Richard Neutra's Kronish House in Beverly Hills have agreed to postpone its demolition until at least Oct. 10 to give preservationists a chance to devise a plan to save the residence.

In a related and groundbreaking action, the Beverly Hills City Council early Wednesday asked the community's Planning Commission to devise a historic-preservation ordinance.

Maine House In Andrew Wyeth Work Now US Landmark

CUSHING, Maine -- A weather-beaten farmhouse in Maine, featured in the backdrop of one of the most famous paintings from the 20th Century, is now a national landmark.

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The Olson House in Cushing where Andrew Wyeth painted "Christina's World" was one of 14 landmarks to receive the designation from U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Thursday.

"It's now affirmation that it's an American icon," said Christropher Brownawell, executive director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, which has owned the farmhouse for the past 20 years.

Wyeth, who lived in Pennsylvania, spent 30 summers in Maine and he used the farm as a backdrop for the 1948 painting of Christina Olson, who suffered from polio and was unable to walk, crawling through a field toward the farm.

The Olson House, which overlooks the St. George River and Muscongus Bay, is where Wyeth, who died in 2009 at age 91, developed a relationship with Christina and Alvaro Olson that spanned 30 years. Wyeth's gravestone is near the property.

The Farnsworth Art Museum is currently displaying a collection of 50 watercolors and drawings depicting the Olsons and the farmhouse. "Christina's World" is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Al Gore's New $8.875 Million Montecito Villa

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Via Real Estalker, Al and Tipper Gore have picked up a $8.875M luxury getaway in Montecito, CA; a swanky zip code that has attracted big name residents like Oprah Winfrey, Steve Martin, and Kirk Douglas. Records show that the approximately 6,500 sq. foot home boasts 6 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, a large pool house, 6 fireplaces, wood framed french doors, and carved stone detailing throughout. Check out the slideshow and see what you think: tacky or tasteful.