1323 West Wellington

Proud Owner of 1323 Wellington

In 1975 I bought a house on Wellington Avenue in Chicago. I paid $18,000 dollars for that building. It was a frame home with two apartments, an attic, and an ancient garage out back. It was run down, had only space heaters for Chicago's harsh winters, termite damage, and a chain link fence around it. I lived there for three years. In those three years I had two tenants. One that I liked a lot, and one that I had to evict. The thing about that house is that it taught me a great deal about real estate and timing. You see, I paid $18k for it in 1975 and sold it in early 1978 for $22k. That house was in the heart of the Lakeview neighborhood. A very working class place in 1975, but move ahead ten years and it was suddenly the gentrified 'Yuppie' destination. See what happened there? If I had hung on for just seven more years I could have sold that rickety dump for half a million dollars. Instead I sold it and took my money out to California. Not that I didn't enjoy my year in California. At least half of that year was fun, until I ran through my little real estate nest egg. So yes, I learned something from that experience and never sold a home short again. Termites, bad neighbors, the lust to move on to another state, none of those things would ever again lure me away from the prize. I recently looked up that property to see what it was worth today. It's worth $1,200,000.  Yes, eighteen thousand in 1975 and over a million dollars today. But I don't feel that bad because this is what it looks like today. 

Yep, they tore down that dump and built this.