In the News

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…

There’s a number every lender, financial planner and well-meaning parent eventually throws at you: 30%. Keep your housing costs at or below 30% of your gross income and you’re “affordable.” It’s the threshold HUD uses, it’s the line Redfin uses, and this month it’s the yardstick in a pile of national stories asking whether the…

Nobody has ever walked into a Bartlett split-level, sniffed the air, and said, “Ah, radon.” That’s the whole problem with the stuff. It’s colorless, odorless, and arrives through the same basement floor you just fell in love with at the open house. Mold at least has the decency to smell. Wells and septic systems hide…

Here’s the sentence the remodeling industry would prefer you skim past: almost no home improvement pays you back more than you spend on it. A local team’s roundup this week put it plainly. The return on a home upgrade is almost never more than 100%. You are not getting rich off a kitchen. At best…

Here’s a staging truth nobody puts on a Pinterest board: in a few weeks, most of your buyers will see your house in the dark. Daylight saving time ends Sunday, November 1, and after that the sun is down around 4:30 in the afternoon. The couple who tours your Bartlett split-level at 5:45 on a…

Last month the City of Chicago cut the ribbon on The Bellwether at 79 W. Monroe Street, the first finished office-to-housing conversion in the Loop. It took a 121-year-old, 14-story office building and turned 11 of its floors into 117 apartments, 41 of them set aside for households at an average of 60% of area…