After Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was selected to become the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, offers began flooding in to buy this modest house outside Chicago, the real estate broker said.
Real estate prices jump for a lot of reasons: location, the market, even a shiny new kitchen. But one humble house in Chicago could have sticker shock thanks to being the childhood home of the first American pope. Call it a papal price bump.
Moments after white smoke emerged from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel to signal the selection of a new pope, the price on a modest brick house in Dolton, Ill., 30 minutes south of downtown Chicago, went up. How much is still to be decided, but the world discovered that Pope Leo XIV once lived in the humble house on 141st Place.
Offers began flooding in to Steve Budzik, a real estate broker who had fielded a handful of offers in recent months for the house that he originally listed for $199,000. The owner has pulled it off the market as the two evaluate the potential windfall, he said.
It’s unclear exactly when Pope Leo XIV, who was then Robert Prevost, lived in the home, but his father owned it from before Leo’s birth in 1955 until selling it in 1996, when Leo was working in Peru.
