Posted by Bud on February 26, 2010 at 20:32:32:
ELITE STREET | Chicago Tribune | By Bob Goldsborough
With a desire to spend more time at their Michigan summer home, former WLS-Ch. 7 political reporter Andy Shaw and his wife want to scale back from their labor-intensive lifestyle running their Windy City Urban Inn bed-and-breakfast inside their Lincoln Park mansion.
So, they've listed the eight-bedroom mansion for $3 million. After they sell it, they plan to move to a condo downtown.
Now the Better Government Association's executive director, Shaw, 61, retired in January 2009 after 25 years at ABC-7 Channel 7.
In 1998, the Shaws paid $973,000 for the 6,000-square-foot, 124-year-old mansion. They converted it to an inn with eight baths and six rentable bedrooms, and gutted and -rehabbed the three-unit, five-bedroom coach house.
"We ran it as an inn at full speed for more than a decade, and we loved every minute," Shaw said. "It's a great house on a great street in a great neighborhood, and we attracted some of those most interesting visitors in the entire world. It was a phenomenal experience and a wonderful business for my wife to run while I did my ABC job."
But as the couple approached 60, however, they started to burn out. They listed the property for eight months in 2007 for $2.999 million. They re-listed it last year for $3 million.
"We don't have to sell," Shaw said. "If we needed to get the cash out of it, we'd sell it for a lot less. There's no reason to give it away."
Buyers could continue operating the inn or convert it to a single-family home, condos, a nonprofit group's headquarters or a corporate training center, Shaw said.
"It's a turnkey," he said. "It's ready to go right now in any number of ways."