Homes for sale in
Country Club Estates.

Country Club Estates is the kind of neighborhood that only exists in a town with a hundred-year head start. The golf club here opened in July 1922, carved out of the Owen family's riverfront farm at a moment when McHenry was reinventing itself as a resort destination for Chicagoans, and houses followed almost immediately. A century later that history is still legible in the streets. Country Club Drive, Golfview Road, and Fairway Drive wrap the course, and the housing stock reads like a core sample of twentieth-century building, from 1920s cottages to postwar ranches to 1960s splits to the occasional 1990s custom dropped onto a leftover lot. You get mature trees that no new subdivision can fake, and a walk of a few blocks puts you on the Fox River or on the Riverwalk heading into downtown.

The daily rhythm here is small river town rather than commuter suburb. The Riverwalk connects to restaurants and to the Riverwalk Shoppes at Miller Point, Miller Riverfront gives you a boat launch, and Petersen Park has a beach on McCullom Lake and hosts Fiesta Days each July. Moraine Hills State Park, Glacial Park, and the Prairie Trail are all short drives. Practical needs are covered without leaving town, with a full acute care hospital on Medical Center Drive and the big-box corridor on Route 31 north of Route 120. For a buyer who wants an actual downtown within walking distance rather than a clubhouse and a retention pond, that is the whole pitch.

Now the honest tradeoffs, and there are several. The club is not yours. It was sold in January 2025, renamed McHenry Golf Club, and remains a private membership operation, so living on Fairway Drive gets you the view, not the tee time. The age of the housing cuts both ways: no HOA means no dues and nobody telling you what color to paint, but it also means nobody is enforcing anything, so condition varies noticeably from house to house. On anything pre-1970, budget inspection attention for the electrical panel, any remaining knob-and-tube wiring, galvanized supply lines, roof, foundation, and windows, since original one-bath floor plans and small garages are common and expensive to change. The Metra story is only half a story, because the branch runs weekday peak periods only. Effective property tax rates in McHenry generally land somewhere in the 2.2 to 2.8 percent range of market value, which materially changes what a monthly payment buys. And proximity to the Fox River is an amenity and a diligence item at once, so anyone buying on the river side should pull the flood zone determination and an insurance quote before removing contingencies.