The pandemic’s revival of interest in Michael Jordan’s dunks has not translated into his bricks—at least not enough to end the basketball Hall of Famer’s near-decade-long real estate losing streak.
Despite last spring’s popular Chicago Bulls documentary series, The Last Dance, and a COVID-compelled wave of suburbanization, Jordan still has not found a buyer for the 56,000-square-foot Highland Park, Ill., mansion he inhabited during his championship playing days. As of this month, the home will have sat on the market for nine years.
“I think [The Last Dance] just put everything back in the forefront of everybody’s mind, but a lot of people just wanted to tour it—it is not that they wanted to buy it,” said Compass’s Katherine Malkin, the property’s longtime listing agent. She added that the renewed focus on Jordan did inspire interest from “more people from the Asian and European markets,” but that she still envisions the eventual buyer being a local family.
The home, which was originally put up for sale in March 2012 for $29 million, was last priced at just over half of that—$14,855,000. Even at this significantly reduced rate, the property is currently the fifth most expensive residence listed for public sale in Chicagoland, according to Zillow.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s longtime All-NBA sidekick Scottie Pippen is also struggling to unload his 10,000-square-foot Highland Park home, which has been on and off the market since it was initially listed for $3.1 million in 2016. At present, Pippen’s pad can be had for $2.1 million—roughly the amount he earned in salary for the 1994-95 season, not adjusting for inflation.
In October, another former Bull, Toni Kukoc, sold his Highland Park home for $920,000, after years of it being listed and de-listed. Kukoc had originally purchased that 5,000-square-foot house—which sports a basketball half-court emblazoned with the Air Jordan insignia in the backyard—in 1993 for $1.2 million.
As one of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, Highland Park was once a logical place for Bulls players to reside, given its proximity to the team’s former training center in the neighboring city of Deerfield. In 2014, however, the team relocated its practices to a brand new facility next to the United Center, in the city’s booming West Loop, and many of the Bulls’ post-Jordan-era stars, like Derrick Rose, have favored downtown high-rises instead of suburbia.
By 2012, Jordan permanently had relocated from the Windy City to a sprawling, golf-adjacent estate he had built in the exclusive Bear’s Club community of Jupiter, Fla. Since then, Jordan has paid more than $1.3 million in property tax on his Illinois enclave, according to county records.
Jordan also owns a pair of homes in Charlotte, N.C., where he is the majority owner of the NBA’s Hornets, and in December he sold a fifth residence—his 10,000-square-foot mountain retreat in Park City, Utah. Its selling price went undisclosed, but it was last listed for $7.5 million.
Malkin, Jordan’s Chicago-based realtor, did not indicate whether the plan was to further reduce the price of his Highland Park property.
“We continue to get a number of calls,” she said, “but they are often not qualified for buying and wish they could see the house and meet Michael Jordan.”
