ChitownLiving | Chicago Real Estate + Life

For those that don’t care, just start to search Chicago properties.  You will be able to search more listings than ever before without having to log in. For those that do, read on.  NRT owned Coldwell Banker offices have recently started the process of making their vast number of listings more available to the consumer.  The following [...]

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Rules real estate agents should live by.  Jim Duncan pointed me to this post at the Big Picture.  While agents are thought of as being big talkers, the skill of listening is more important.

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Working with buyers and sellers, I often find myself online sifting through listings.  This act brings me face to face with the dreaded spinning room virtual tour.  After viewing many of these, I often feel dizzy when getting up from my chair.  They distort and can misrepresent room sizes.  A friend of mine jokingly thinks virtual tours are [...]

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I have been meaning to write a brief post on showing feedback for some time as it baffles me.  Geno over at Chicago’s Home Weblog beat me to it with an interesting take.  While representing buyers, I get these all the time after showings.  The requests come in three forms, the on-site “assault”, the phone call, and the [...]

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Looks like MAP and MLSNI are one step closer to a consolidation.
The Board of Directors of the MAP Multiple Listing Service (MAP) on Thursday unanimously approved a consolidation with the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois, Inc. (MLSNI). MAP and MLSNI operate the two principal MLS systems serving REALTORS® in the greater Chicagoland area. The MLSNI [...]

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In my post, MLSNI and and MAP to Consolidate, I requested the link to the site, Save our MLS.  Found it courtesy of a Chicago Agent article titled, “Word War Beaks Out in MLS Merger Debate”.  Darn that “.info” extension. Happy to report that the Chicago Association of Realtors is in support of the merger.  Ginger [...]

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In Northern Illinois there have been two MLS systems, MLSNI and MAP.  These are the databases that urban Chicago real estate agents use to market, search, and share property listings across brokerages.  In addition, data from these systems is provide to other aggregator sites such as Realtor.com and local brokerage sites such as Coldwell Banker.  Having two systems has been [...]

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In Chicago, the main listing system used by agents and providing data to all the different property search sites is the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI).  Market time has long been a hot button when marketing property in Chicago.  A listing with a very high market time always begs the question, “What’s wrong with [...]

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Just read an article taken from Yahoo! posted on RealTalk, one of the many agent forums.  Many agents are up in arms about the article.  I think some is true and some is pure bull … slang for false.  The article makes a lot of generalizations and really needs to take into account geographical location and [...]

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Wow, Eileen captures my feelings perfecly in her most recent article regarding the current brokerage business model.  It is broken but can be fixed.  I am often left wondering just what does my brokerage do for me?

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I’m addicted to spam, and I’m not talking about the mystery meat that comes in a tin can. In the Chicago real estate market we are all being spammed. As a real estate agent, it used to be that just our clients complained of spam. Going onto one of our agent websites to do a [...]

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