George Furbeck listed

[Oak Park Jogger]

Regarding house prices in Oak Park, noted above, it's important to remember that Oak Park includes a VERY wide range of styles and sizes of homes. The area around Furbeck is a neighborhood of large and elegant homes, while other parts of Oak Park are predominately smaller homes on smaller lots. There are a lot of small bungalows in town--also often really lovely, carefully maintained homes. But they sell for less because they are smaller. If you have only visited Oak Park for Wright Plus or to see the FLW buildings you might have missed the diversity of the community.

[pharding]

A high percentage FLW houses are owned by business owners and professionals that are rather independently minded and value unique real estate. As a group this category of potential owners has taken a financial hit and their businesses have been slow to recover. Banks are under much more robust Federal guidelines for lending. Plus too many existing FLW homeowners are overly optimistic when setting the initial asking price. Wright properties that are priced right initially do much better in terms of the price that they actually get than those that set unrealistic initial prices and chop, chop away with robust reductions that induce doubt in the market place.

Plus the mindset about residential real estate in general has changed significantly making buyers more conservative.

What Furbeck and the back half of Coonley were initially priced at means nothing when evaluating the market for FLW houses. Recently the Mrs. Thomas Gale House was priced realistically from the start and it sold promptly.

In summary the sky is not falling for the future of FLW Houses. These is no need to disparage ownership of these great houses. What we are seeing is temporary respite, like the markets everywhere for residential real estate requiring jumbo mortgages. FLW Houses will always be great houses to live in and enjoy. What we are seeing is temporary weakening in demand for FLW Houses and some FLW Homeowners that have not accepted the current reality of the marketplace.