In Chicagoland, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style homes draw tourists and architecture enthusiasts from around the world. Many of his buildings across the city have been meticulously cared for and preserved. Fans could head to Oak Park, where they can visit the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio, built as the architect’s own residence in 1889; or stop by the Robie House in Hyde Park, for a tour of the 1910 structure. Located in Chicago’s west side neighborhood of Austin, the Walser House is another significant Wright-designed property: Built in 1903 for printing executive Joseph Jacob Walser, it is one of only seven surviving homes in the city limits. It’s an example of Wright’s more modest work designed to fit on a narrow city-sized lot—though streamlined for a smaller footprint, its deep roof eaves, band of windows, and floor plan are indicative of Wright’s style. While it was built during the area’s heyday, today, Austin is rebuilding after decades of disinvestment—and the Walser House, one of its most cherished cultural landmarks, is also in need of revitalization.

Despite its heritage and its significance to the neighborhood, the Walser House is in bad shape. The building’s most recent steady owner held the property for nearly five decades, beginning in 1970. After her death in 2019, it entered a long, hazy legal limbo and was left vacant for five years. Despite having local and national historic designations, it ended up on Preservation Chicago’s and Landmarks Illinois’s Most Endangered Buildings lists. The property has moved slowly through the foreclosure process, all the while sitting boarded up and quiet. That is until earlier this month, when the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, which has been diligently advocating for the Walser House for years, received a Google alert about it. To their surprise, someone had listed the property on Zillow. The listing kicked off what would become a short-lived mystery, one whose resolution reveals one of the many unfortunate outcomes when a building is left to decay.

The Walser House’s story echoes that of many estates that are located in disinvested neighborhoods: After a longtime owner passes away, the financial challenges inherent to keeping an aging house up can lead to a real struggle for their heirs, especially those who lack the resources to do so. Wright homes are no ordinary brick-and-mortar two flats, either; many haven’t aged gracefully, necessitating major, expensive renovations and repairs. Though the house was well-maintained over the past four decades, Barb Gordon, executive director of the Conservancy, says that after the owner’s death it was discovered that they had taken out a reverse mortgage in the 1990s to redo the roof. “Somehow it got converted to a line of credit, and then it really became financially unsustainable for her heirs when she died,” she explains. The house entered the foreclosure process in 2023.

Since 2019, the house has deteriorated far beyond the usual wear that can happen when an owner is aging. “Clearly, any owner who is in their nineties is not focused on major house projects. There were issues, but it did not look at all like it does today,” says Gordon. While the building was moving through the foreclosure process, the Conservancy worked with local nonprofit redevelopment and community group Austin Coming Together to keep tabs on its state. By 2024, the condition was dire.

“Any building that is left vacant for five years is going to just continue to deteriorate,” Gordon explains. She says that visits to the house found doors wide open, suggesting that squatters were going inside; at one point they found a space heater running unattended. They submitted building violations in order to get it boarded up, hired landscapers to remove overgrown trees, and laid tarps to stop water seepage, all while attending various court hearings related to the foreclosure process. Finally, in December last year, the building went up for judicial sale.

“Austin Coming Together was trying to buy it before it went for judicial sale, but the lender did not take them up on that,” Gordon says. The lender wanted to see what they could get for it, she continues, and they set the opening bid price at $240,000. “When this property came up , it was like a 30-second nope. Nobody was ready to buy it because everyone knows how much work is going to be needed, and that the comps just didn’t support what they were asking.” The county chancery court formally transferred the home to Fannie Mae on January 9.

A week later, the home appeared on Zillow as “For Sale By Owner” at a price of $350,000. The Conservancy team thought something felt off when they saw it listed. Still, they went ahead and added it to their website’s “Wright on the Marketplace” page where other FLW-designed homes for sale are featured. Their partners at Austin Coming Together also noticed the listing and, together, they began reaching out to the owner using the phone number listed on Zillow. It went to voicemail.

“It was this very unprofessional, incoherent mailbox,” Gordon says, and recalls thinking, “Hmm, this doesn’t sound like a person that I want to do business with.” The listing itself was equally confusing, filled with misspellings, unusual acronyms, and text that seemed to be pulled from various internet sources using AI. They scoured other listing sites like Trulia and Redfin—often listings are syndicated across platforms—and found nothing; they contacted a realtor and found no MLS listing. After Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, they were able to confirm with Fannie Mae that the listing was, indeed, fake; they removed the listing from their website stating that whomever listed the home was “possibly aiming to defraud a well-intentioned potential purchaser.”

Though it’s still unknown who might have been behind the scheme—and the Zillow listing has since been removed—the flurry of events this month should raise some eyebrows over how For Sale By Owner listings work; anyone can claim a property and create a listing using an email and cell phone number. Zillow does have a verification process that includes an automated call, so it’s unclear how the “seller” might’ve skirted reviewers. Reddit is filled with various scenarios in which renters have been scammed out of deposits and fees for background checks; buyers who listed their homes and had photos and descriptions scraped for fake listings. CBS covered FSBO scams in 2024, noting that fake sellers list multimillion-dollar homes at a fraction of the actual value to attract and defraud bargain hunters—but the Walser House’s fake owner took the opposite route, listing the home for far more than its appraisal or auction value.

Gordon believes that this whole process is an example of these “buyer beware” scenarios, but emphasizes that it highlights how allowing homes to decay opens the doors to opportunists to take advantage of a property. For now, it’ll remain in Fannie Mae’s possession until it is ready to sell officially and legally; though the individual who listed the home on Zillow has not been identified, they likely knew about the building’s architectural heritage, as well as its state of disrepair. Ultimately, it’s a reminder that even a building with a famous author can be lost—already, the list of demolished Wright buildings is long. In a place like Chicago’s West Side, where such a property is a point of pride and a potential attraction, such a loss could have an outsize impact on a neighborhood that is striving toward revitalization and renewal. The house has a lot of advocates—preservation groups, community partners, we’re all advocates for it,” Gordon says, “but in the end, as a foreclosed property and one that is so disinvested, it’s just so vulnerable.”

Top photo by Serhii Chrucky/Alamy.

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