Real estate news & trends

News from around the Web - 5/17

Illinois third in foreclosures despite national improvement

States Diverting Mortgage Settlement Money to Other Uses

Single-Family Rentals Keep Pulling In Investors

More

Latest news from YoChicago

Search posts
Tips & adviceRenting

How to find an experienced, professional rental agent

Amy Reynolds video

Our recently-launched YoRents service connects renters directly with quality landlords. Many renters, however, are daunted by the task of finding an apartment on their own, or unwilling to invest the time, and choose to work with a rental agent. That choice presents them with an even more daunting task: finding an agent who will respect ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on May 15, 2012
Tips & adviceLegal

domu offers excellent info for landlords, basement-dwelling hermits

I’m not a fan of domu’s rental search, despite its slick map-based interface and ease of use. I’d rather take a slower path to accurate, up-to-date information than domu’s quicker one to info that’s often stale and sometimes misleading. If you’re a renter, check out our at-a-glance apartments lists and maps and search MLS listings ...

1 comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on May 14, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Apartment Savvy targets the dumbest renters on the planet

Aerial view of Lincoln Park

Apartment Savvy, one of the rental services on our do-not-call list, has been reviewed 85 times at the Google Places page for its 2835 N Clark St office. Almost all of the reviews give the company 5 stars, and almost all of them are so patently phony that they’ll leave you laughing and wondering. Can ...

4 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on May 4, 2012
Tips & adviceBuying

YoChicago’s best new homes of 2007, an update

X/O Condominiums

Five years ago yesterday we posted the picks of our then editorial staff for Chicago’s best new homes 2007. Our staff had a near-perfect record of spotting projects that either wouldn’t be built or would prove problematic for buyers if they were. In the eight categories in which we picked winners, only one project proved ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on May 1, 2012
Tips & adviceSelling

Quote of the day – a prestige name trumps a good school

Charon's landing

Development names matter, according to syndicated columnist Lew Sichelman: Home buyers pay an average of 4.2% more when the development has the word “country” in the name, according to a study by two researchers at the University of Georgia. And if it has the term “country club” as part of its name, buyers will pay ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on May 1, 2012
Tips & adviceHome improvement

Domicile Furniture’s vandalism spree

Domicile Furniture sign

I don’t know about you, but I would never do business with a company that litters my environment with illegal signage. My travels around Chicagoland bring me into frequent contact with signage for Domicile Furniture, both on the public right-of-way and on private property. The company’s on a large-scale, ongoing vandalism spree, and seems determined ...

1 comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 30, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

My Place Apartments gussies up Google Reviews

Crazy Steve screen cap

When we last checked in on Crazy Steve and My Place Apartments they were soliciting deadbeats, felons and strippers as clients. As you can see from the above screen cap, they’ve broadened their marketing appeal to reach out to dump-dwellers, couch-surfers, flunking students and grandma-evictees. The firm has garnered 49 filtered reviews at Yelp and ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 27, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Urban Lux – rental spam as search bait

Urban Lux screen cap

Chicago-based Urban Lux promises to “change the way people find apartments” as it expands “throughout the US and Europe” – but delivers the bait-and-switch experience that you expect from Chicago rental services. Urban Lux has built a richly-visual, feature-packed site that lists many buildings and includes MLS listings. What may strike the casual visitor as ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 25, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Condo – a dirty word for apartment rental services

Park Millennium floor plan

A while back we wrote about 2-bedroom, 2-bath units in a full-amenity condo high-rise renting for the same price ($1,950 a month) as a convertible studio directly across the street in a full-amenity rental building. If you were working with one of Chicago’s parasitical rental services you would not have been offered the choice between ...

9 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 20, 2012
Tips & adviceBuying

Is short sale fraud on the increase?

This morning’s email brought the following from a local Realtor: Meet the latest in shady practices – the short sale come-on tease. These are listings that are advertised as short sales but…aren’t….really. I represented some buyers who wanted to make an offer on a so-called shorts, but was told, after many dodgy evasions of my ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 17, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Why PadMapper is worse than useless for Chicago renters

PadMapper screen cap

One of our recent commenters touted PadMapper as a way to search for apartments in Chicago, so I thought it might be useful to take a look at what that site has to offer. If you’re not familiar with PadMapper, it’s a fast, slick, map-based interface to ads largely derived from Craigslist and other sources, ...

8 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 17, 2012
Tips & adviceBuying

Chicago Association of Realtors continues to promote ethics violations

Chicago Association of Realtors screen cap

A week ago we wondered whether the Chicago Association of Realtors (CAR) was fostering trademark fraud. CAR has since removed the offending use of the federal registered trademark symbol from the web page we questioned. In that week-ago post we mentioned that we had previously questioned what we called CAR’s “cavalier attitude toward the misuse ...

9 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 15, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Supplementing the Trib’s apartment hunting tips

DePaul University, Kardas Photography

Today’s Chicago Tribune has an informative article about apartment-hunting strategies in what’s currently a landlord’s market. It’s generally good advice – as far it goes. As the Trib notes, apartments are renting very quickly. It’s always been the case that rental services could and would show renters only a limited selection of apartments. That selection ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 13, 2012
Tips & adviceBuying

Chicago Cash Flow agitates my sleaze-o-meter

East Garfield Park

I’m instantly suspicious of any pitch I hear on the radio for a real estate investment proposition, and I’d suggest you ought to be too. A good rule of thumb is: don’t do business with any real estate company that advertises on the radio unless it’s a long-established brand. Be triply suspicious if you hear ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 13, 2012
Tips & adviceSelling

Would you like to hose your real estate agent?

Australian real estate video

Australian real estate agents have taken to video far more enthusiastically than their American counterparts, have been more creative in their approach to it, and seem to have more fun in the process. Chris Gilmour, the agent who’s getting hosed in the above video, appears frequently in the following video: It’s hard to imagine an ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 12, 2012
Tips & adviceBuying

Is the Chicago Association of Realtors fostering trademark fraud?

Real estate agents often have a long list of acronyms corresponding to “professional” designations following their names. My generally-accurate rule of thumb is: the more unrecognizable acronyms, the less competent the agent. That’s especially true as to acronyms that aren’t officially recognized or endorsed by the National Association of Realtors. Some of the designations claimed ...

2 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 9, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Will Illinois ever crack down on unlicensed rental agents?

LinkedIn screen cap

Chicago renters and landlords have been plagued for years by a rental services industry that operates as if there were no law enforcement in Illinois. Consumers have been howling about rental services’ tactics at Yelp and other venues for years, to little effect. It’s a subject we’ve repeatedly covered at YoChicago, and we’ve published a ...

6 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 6, 2012
Tips & adviceLegal

Should you hire an attorney who specializes in real estate?

Scales of justice

It’s an oft-repeated truism that you should hire an attorney who specializes in real estate to represent you in connection with your real estate purchase. You should. You should never, however, hire an attorney who describes himself as specializing in real estate, as many local practitioners do on their websites. The ethical standards for Illinois ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 3, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

Attorney General’s office declares war on Chicago rental services

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan

Late Friday the Illinois Attorney General’s office announced the formation of an inter-agency task force to combat what AG Lisa Madigan referred to as “an unprecedented crime wave by Chicago-based so-called apartment finders.” According to a news release issued by the AG’s office, the task force will include representatives from the Illinois Department of Financial ...

3 comments Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on April 1, 2012
Tips & adviceRenting

YoRents proving popular with Chicago lakefront renters

Joeff Davis photo, Belmont Harbor

It’s been less than 4 weeks since we launched YoRents, our online speed dating service for renters and landlords. Renters can place a free apartment-wanted ad on YoRents that triggers an email to landlords who have apartments in their target neighborhoods, then relax and wait for an email response from the landlords who have apartments ...

Comment Read the full article →
Posted by Joe Zekas on March 29, 2012