Real estate news & trends
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Craigslist
Unlike a number of buildings that don’t allow rental services to advertise their property anywhere, 500 Lake Shore Drive‘s broker agreement (PDF) explicitly authorizes them to advertise on their own websites. Rental services are prohibited from advertising the property on Craigslist or other sites, and are not allowed to use their own photos in any ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 6, 2013
A tipster emailed us last week, suggesting that “something smells fishy … over at Chicago Apartment Hunters” (CAH). At its website CAH bills itself as “Chicago’s premier locating service.” Well, you’ll need to look at many rental service websites before you’ll find an apartment locator that isn’t number one or the largest or the leading ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on March 25, 2013
You can drive yourself bonkers searching for a Bucktown apartment on Craigslist or working with apartment rental services, or you can take a smart approach: just go to Bucktown, and bike or drive the streets looking for FOR RENT signs. Supplement your efforts by searching MLS-listed rentals at a reputable brokerage firm’s website. Joe Askins ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on March 12, 2013
If you’re not very bright, have no self respect, and don’t mind committing the occasional crime, Schwab Property Solutions has a job for you. You can start out by acquiring multiple gmail accounts and get paid $1 per live ad for spamming Craigslist with repetitive ads. If your ad leads to the sale of a ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on March 11, 2013
Chicago’s rental services routinely spam Craigslist, Trulia, Zillow, hotpads and other websites with high-volume bait-and-switch advertising. They habitually advertise properties without having the written authorization the law requires. They promise renters expert professionals, but many of their agents can barely find their way around the block. One of my correspondents contends that the blame for ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on February 25, 2013
Not long ago I heard from one of Chicago’s newer high-rises that people were arriving at the building believing they had reservations for short-term stays. They presented print-outs of their reservations to the building staff, who informed them that they were the victims of a scam. Several days ago I received an email from an ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on February 22, 2013
The Illinois Real Estate License Act (“License Act”) requires brokers to include their name in ads, including ads recruiting new agents or brokers. Scan Craigslist help wanted ads for real estate and you’ll see a number of ads soliciting job-seekers who want to become apartment leasing agents. Ads that give no clue as to the ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on February 13, 2013
We’ve written about iMoveChicago several times, put it on our Craigslist’s Dirtiest Dozen rental services roster, and wondered why any renter or landlord would do business with the company. Yelper Simone T recently had what she considered a bad experience with iMove Chicago, and posted a negative review at Yelp. She supplemented her review with ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on February 4, 2013
A number of high-rise rental properties are reporting that their Craigslist ads are being flagged and deleted. The deletions are happening “mysteriously,” to quote a word in one of the email reports I’ve received. This doesn’t seem that difficult a mystery to solve. One need merely ask and answer Lucius Cassius‘ question – cui bono? ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on February 1, 2013
The past week has seen a modest increase in the number of lower-priced one-bedrooms available in the South Loop. We’ve also seen the number of buildings with 3-bedroom apartments available for rent shrink to one during the past week. If you want to rent in the South Loop, you can see all of your managed ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 17, 2013
The most noticeable trend this past week was a modest upward drift in South Loop rents almost across the board, tracking a slight downtick in the number of units available in several buildings. Last week the lowest-priced studio at Astoria Tower, one of our sponsors, was $1,520. One became available this week for $1,360. Two-bedroom ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 10, 2013
We recently selected Urban Lux as the second entry on our roster of Craigslist’s dirtiest dozen advertisers. As of early yesterday evening a search at Craigslist returned 1,370 Urban Lux ads for 61 separate apartment buildings. The number of Urban Lux ads for each property varied widely – from 5 for Park Michigan (one of ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 10, 2013
In your dreams there are – and also at Zillow Rentals, where a query returns 475 single-family homes for rent in ZIP Code 60614. One of those single-family homes is 44 stories high. Zillow Rentals is vying with Craigslist to become the marketplace where you search for your next home or apartment, and it’s succeeding ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on January 7, 2013
According to Craigslist, “Free classified ads sufficiently flagged are subject to automated removal.” Rent Proactive, a Chicago-based apartment finder, has long been one of Craigslist’s worst ad spammers, the subject of highly-suspicious reviews at Yelp, a charter member of our rental service do-not-call list, and a disloyal vendor to landlords whose apartments they’ve rented. I ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 30, 2012
If you scan enough Craigslist ads you’ll find words that are almost always used only by Chicago’s sleazy rental services. We searched Craigslist ads for each of the following words: amazing, awesome, enormous, fabulous, fantastic, spectacular, unbelievable. We then read the first 20 search results, and all of the ads were placed by rental services. ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 28, 2012
If you want to rent in the South Loop, you can see all of your managed apartment building options on YoChicago’s South Loop availability list. There are only a dozen large apartment complexes in the South Loop, and we’ve listed all of them in this Google spreadsheet, and checked what’s available for rent, and what ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 13, 2012
The great majority of the tens of thousands of Chicago apartment ads you see on Craigslist are placed by rental services, also known as locators or finders. Only a few of those ads comply with a basic requirement of Illinois law: real estate licensees must have written authorization from a property’s owner or authorized agent ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 11, 2012
A tipster alerted me to a development that’s worrisome to suburban landlords, and ought to concern tenants also. City-based rental services have begun exploiting consumers’ idiotic dependence on Craigslist for apartment searches by advertising suburban apartments with which they have no connection. When a prospective tenant responds to one of these ads, the piratical rental ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 19, 2012
If you want to rent in the South Loop, you can see all of your managed apartment building options on YoChicago’s South Loop availability list. There are only a dozen large apartment complexes in the South Loop, and we’ve listed all of them in this Google spreadsheet, and checked what’s available for rent, and what ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 15, 2012
If you want to rent in the South Loop, forget Craigslist and apartment finders / rental services and go straight to YoChicago’s South Loop availability list. There are only a dozen large apartment complexes in the South Loop, and we’ve listed all of them in this Google spreadsheet, and checked what’s available for rent, and ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 8, 2012
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