In the News

Moving costs in Chicagoland drop noticeably once summer ends, and late October through early spring is when a local move from Bartlett, Elgin or Schaumburg is usually cheapest to book. Here is what movers actually charge around here right now, how Illinois regulates them, and how to time a move around a home sale or…

Metra has released a draft plan to turn its 11 commuter lines into all-day “regional rail,” with trains every 15 to 30 minutes and, eventually, crosstown trips straight through Union Station. Here’s what that could mean for home buyers and sellers in the northwest suburbs, where the Milwaukee District West line already does a lot…

Halloween is the one night a year when the northwest suburbs show you exactly how they live, and this article is about using it: trick-or-treat hours in Elgin, Schaumburg’s 2026 decorated-house list, and why a buyer should spend Saturday, October 31 driving the streets they’re thinking about living on. Call it the most honest open…

Bartlett development news rarely arrives as a ribbon cutting. It arrives as a line item on a village agenda, a yellow public-hearing sign stuck in a field, or a legal notice in the back of the paper. This piece covers what’s actually in the pipeline around Bartlett right now, and how a proposal moves from…

Flood risk in the Chicago suburbs is less about rivers spilling over their banks and more about where the water goes when two inches of rain fall in an hour. Here’s how flood zones, flood insurance, and Illinois seller disclosure actually work when you’re buying or selling in Bartlett, Elgin, Schaumburg and the towns around…

Every so often a postcard shows up from the township assessor, and someone in Bartlett or Carol Stream opens it, sees a bigger number than last year, and assumes their tax bill just jumped by the same percentage. Usually it didn’t. But that postcard is still the most important piece of property-tax mail you’ll get…

Here is a fact that surprises a lot of buyers in the northwest suburbs: the town name on your mailing address does not decide where your kids go to school. Neither does the village limit. Neither, frankly, does the school field on the MLS listing. In Illinois, school districts are their own units of government…

Every so often a client calls with the same question, usually in a slightly panicked voice: “There’s a sign on the field behind the house we’re buying. Is somebody building something?” Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes it’s 48 townhomes. Either way, the sign is the end of a long paper trail that started months…

Somewhere in Chicago this fall, a landlord held an open house for a one-bedroom and roughly seventeen people showed up wanting it. That’s not an anecdote — it’s the headline number from the latest peak-season Rental Competitiveness Index, as reported by The MortgagePoint: Chicago scored 91.8 out of 100, the most competitive rental market in…

Here’s a quirk of living in the northwest suburbs: two neighbors on the same Bartlett street can have completely different property tax appeal deadlines. One might be in Cook County’s Hanover Township, the other in DuPage County’s Wayne Township. Different county, different board, different calendar. And if you miss your window, you don’t get to…