In the News

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….

There are 512 homes for sale right now across Bartlett, Carol Stream, Streamwood, Hanover Park, Bloomingdale, Schaumburg and Elgin. Fifty of them advertise both a first-floor bedroom and a first-floor full bath. Fifty. Out of 512. In Streamwood it is two listings out of 47. In Carol Stream, four out of 40. That number is…

If you own a home in Bartlett or Carol Stream, there is a piece of mail sitting in your kitchen right now that you probably tossed in the “deal with it later” pile. Deal with it now. Wayne Township mailed its 2026 assessment change notices on August 27 and published the assessment roll on August…

Two sellers close on the same $400,000 house on the same day. One of them writes a check for $1,800 at closing. The other writes one for $600. The only difference between them is which side of a village line the house sits on. Welcome to the Illinois real estate transfer tax — the closing…

There is a deadline three days from now that will shape what your subdivision looks like in 2029, and almost nobody outside a village hall is paying attention to it. August 31, 2026 is the cutoff for this round of Illinois’ Open Space Land Acquisition and Development grants — OSLAD, if you want to sound…

On April 1st of this year, Chicago quietly did something the suburbs have been arguing about for a decade: it made backyard coach houses and basement apartments legal across most of the city. The ADU pilot that ran for three years in a handful of zones became permanent and went citywide, taking the number of…

Here is the uncomfortable truth about remodeling: almost nothing you do to your house pays you back a hundred cents on the dollar when you sell it. The national Cost vs. Value data has said the same thing for years — the projects that come closest to full recovery are the small, boring, exterior ones,…

Drive any street in Bartlett or Streamwood and start counting the white PVC pipes running up the side of the house from the foundation to above the roofline. You will run out of fingers before you run out of block. That pipe is a radon mitigation system, and around here it is not an exotic…