In the News

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…

Here’s a question nobody asks at the bank, but should: how is your contractor going to bill you? One firm number up front, or a deposit, then rough-in, then cabinets, then the punch list? That single detail does more to decide between a home equity loan and a HELOC than almost anything on the lender’s…

California voters are being asked this fall whether their state should borrow money and lend it to homebuyers for down payments (that’s Proposition 37 on their ballot). Illinois skipped the referendum. The Illinois Housing Development Authority has been in the homeownership business since 1967, and right now its biggest program will put 6% of the…

Most people read their HOA documents the same way they read software license agreements: scroll, sigh, sign. That’s a mistake in Illinois, where a condo or homeowners association can do things to a delinquent owner that would surprise most buyers — and where a new state law is about to make associations put their collection…

Every buyer who walks a listing with a forest preserve behind it does the same thing. They go straight past the kitchen, open the back slider, look at the trees, and say some version of “nobody can ever build back there, right?” It’s a fair question, and the answer is mostly yes. But “mostly” is…

Until this summer, Illinois shared a strange distinction with exactly one other state. If your homeowners insurance company decided to raise your premium 25%, there was no regulator anywhere who could tell them no. Wyoming was the only other state that ran things that way. That changed on August 4, when Gov. JB Pritzker signed…