Contractors Wahrenberg & Busching have received a contract to build a residence for William Haller on Madison street. It will cost $5,000.
“Contractors…,” Fort Wayne News (Fort Wayne, Indiana), 19 July 1899, p. 3, col. 6; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 13 December 2013).
Genealogy Lady 
That’s a princely sum for that time. I think I once heard that the house I grew up in coast $2,500–but I could be all wrong about that.