MJ’s final big shot in Chicago appears to have finally found net.
Michael Jordan‘s Highland Park, Ill., mansion, which features 56,000 square feet of indoor space situated on nearly 8.4 acres, was listed as contingent Monday, more than a dozen years after it was originally put up for sale. Crain’s Chicago Business was the first to report the news.
It is not currently known who the buyer is or how much they have agreed to pay the NBA Hall of Famer. The home had been listed at $14.9 million since 2017, nearly half of its original price of $29 million in 2012.
Since its listing, Jordan has spent over $1.8 million on the home’s property taxes, according to records with the Lake County (Ill.) Assessor’s Office, and most recently plunked down another $68K to cover the second half payment for 2023.
The property, which Jordan and his ex-wife Juanita Vanoy built in the mid-1990s, was originally titled under her name before the couple divorced in 2006, after which Jordan took full ownership. In the years since, Jordan increasingly spent his time in Florida and permanently relocated to the Sunshine State in 2013 upon the completion of a $35 million mansion in Jupiter, Fla.’s Bear’s Club. Earlier this year, Jordan reportedly spent $16.5 million to purchase another home in that same exclusive gated community, which sits next to Trump National Golf Club.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s suburban Chicago enclave continued to sit in the real estate equivalent of the permanent inactive list, its fate seemingly unchanged by even the Covid pandemic’s wave of suburbanization or the popularity of The Last Dance, the Netflix docu-series about MJ’s final championship season with the Chicago Bulls.
“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,” Katherine Malkin, the property’s longtime listing agent, told Sportico in 2021.
Earlier this month, the The Wall Street Journal profiled the seemingly unsellable home in a real estate feature, the latest in long string of such articles noting the long passage of time since it went to market.
Two of Jordan’s former Bulls teammates have, in recent years, sold their nearby Highland Park residences at a loss. In 2020, Toni Kukoc sold his longtime pad for $920,000, which he had originally purchased for $1.19 million in 1993.
In 2021, Scottie Pippen sold his Highland Park mansion for $1.8 million, after having originally listed in for $3.1 million in 2015.
