In the News

If you opened a homeowners insurance renewal this summer, read the number, and then read it again — you are not imagining it, and you are definitely not alone. Illinois now has a law about that. It just will not do anything for you until July 1, 2027. That gap between “signed” and “in effect”…

The envelope that landed in Wayne Township mailboxes on August 27 is probably the most ignored piece of mail in DuPage County. It isn’t a bill. Nothing is due. There’s no payment stub, no late fee, no threatening red type. So most people file it under “deal with this later,” and later turns out to…

Every seller asks the staging question in roughly the same shape: “Do I really need to spend two thousand dollars renting furniture for a house I’m trying to get out of?” It’s a fair question, and most of the answers floating around online are written by people who sell staging services. So I did something…

Every few months a commission headline crosses the wire and somebody in Bartlett forwards it to me with three question marks. This week it was two of them: a Washington state regulator reminding agents that they can only be paid through their own brokerage, and another round of coverage on the $120 million antitrust settlement…

There are ten homes for rent in Bartlett right now. Ten. In the same MLS pull, there are seventy-seven single-family and attached homes for sale. That ratio — roughly one rental for every eight listings on the market — is the part of the rent-versus-buy debate that national headlines keep leaving out. And there are…

The number that surprises people at an Illinois closing table is almost never the lawyer’s bill. It’s the property tax credit — a five-figure line item on plenty of Chicagoland deals that exists purely because Illinois collects property taxes a year behind. Buyers brace for the “2 to 3 percent in closing costs” they read…

Nearly every list of first-time homebuyer mistakes says the same five things: get pre-approved, don’t chase the lowest rate, don’t skip the inspection, don’t drain your savings, don’t buy a car in the middle of underwriting. All true. All useless once you’re standing in a Bartlett kitchen with a decision to make on Sunday night….

Drive through the middle of almost any town out here on a Tuesday morning and you can read its future off the storefronts. A dry cleaner, a nail salon, a place that has been “coming soon” since the Biden administration, and one beautifully restored brick building that somebody clearly spent real money on. That last…

Here is a fact that surprises people who have lived in Bartlett for a decade: your neighbor three streets over may pay their property taxes to an entirely different county than you do. Bartlett is one of the few Chicagoland villages that straddles three counties — Cook, DuPage, and a western sliver in Kane. That…

There is a house on a side street near the Bartlett depot with a wraparound porch, a slate-gray roofline that predates every subdivision within three miles, and a kitchen that has not been meaningfully touched since the Ford administration. Every few years it comes up in conversation as a teardown. It is not a teardown….