A brick bungalow on Chicago's Sunnyside Avenue just hit the market with a price tag that would make most bungalow owners do a double take: $2.25 million. The six-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom home at 2616 W. Sunnyside Ave. spans 4,500 square feet, a far cry from the modest one-story brick boxes the style is known for across the city.
According to Crain's Chicago Business, the listing could mark the first time a Chicago bungalow has asked more than $2 million, though the report is careful to frame that as a possibility rather than a confirmed record, since the home has not yet sold and no verified sale price exists. Crain's reported that the bungalow hit the market on October 16, 2026. The listing, posted on Trulia, shows an asking price of $2,250,000. Jill Halpern of @properties Christie's International Real Estate holds the listing.
From One Story to Six Bedrooms
The home wasn't always this sprawling. Per the Trulia listing, the structure started as a one-story brick bungalow before the main and lower levels were fully gutted and a second story was added, along with new interiors throughout. That kind of transformation turns the traditional one-and-a-half-story Chicago bungalow footprint into something closer to a modern single-family mansion, while keeping the brick bones that define the style.
Chicago's bungalow stock is enormous by comparison. The city has more than 80,000 bungalows, which make up about a third of its single-family housing stock, according to the Chicago Architecture Center. Most of those homes went up during an extraordinary growth spurt: between 1910 and 1930, the city added more than a million residents, and bungalows became the default housing solution for that influx, per the same organization.
A Hot Market Backdrop
The Sunnyside listing is landing in a Chicago housing market defined by tight inventory and persistent buyer demand. Prices have soared at the lower end of the market over the last couple of years due to a stark lack of available inventory and the sheer number of buyers, per The Real Deal. Chicagoland homes have been selling in an average of 27 days this year, well under the 52-day national average, the outlet reports, and the region logged 62 home sales of $4 million or more in the first half of 2026 — the third-highest first-half total on record.
Redfin's more recent numbers paint a similar picture of a market still moving, even if growth has moderated. Over the three months ending in September, Chicago's median home sale price hit $410,000, up 7.8% from the same period a year earlier, according to Redfin. Homes sold in an average of 52 days during that window, down slightly from 54 days the year before, though the total number of sales dipped to 6,728 in September from 6,763 the previous year.
Bungalows Have Climbed Before
Bungalow prices breaking new ground isn't entirely unprecedented, even if $2 million is new territory. In Ravenswood Manor, a riverfront Arts & Crafts bungalow on Sunnyside Avenue with a private dock and river views drew attention when several neighborhood sales pushed past the million-dollar mark more than a decade ago, including a gut-renovated four-bedroom that fetched $1.14 million, according to Chicago magazine. At the time, the priciest listing in that pocket of the neighborhood was a 1917 four-bedroom asking $895,000.
The earlier bungalow sales described above look modest next to the Sunnyside Avenue asking price today, illustrating how bungalow values have climbed across different eras of Chicago's housing cycles.
Preservation Pressures on the Style
The scale of the Sunnyside renovation also echoes a broader tension within Chicago's bungalow belt. The Chicago Bungalow Association launched a campaign in 2016 opposing second-floor tear-off additions, often called pop tops, according to Homes.com, arguing they alter the character of a housing style built for a specific, modest scale. Whether the Sunnyside Avenue expansion followed that same playbook isn't detailed in the listing, but the home's transformation from a one-story original to a 4,500-square-foot, two-level residence reflects the kind of dramatic makeover preservation advocates have been watching closely.
For now, the Sunnyside Avenue bungalow remains a listing, not a sale, and whether it actually closes anywhere near $2.25 million — let alone becomes the priciest bungalow sale on record — is still unknown. But its arrival on the market, amid a Chicago housing climate defined by scarce inventory and resilient demand, has already turned heads in a city where the humble brick bungalow has long been treated as anything but a luxury product.
