Author: Geno Petro (page 3 of 4)

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I grab myself by the ear and drag my own sorry ass to the ‘place’ where I’m supposed to be writing something significant on a daily basis–a small, shady library room in the front of our 1890s Victorian house in Chicago. I look around and consider my resources: Mission style writing desk and leather straight back chair; Laptop, printer, copier; A collection of books by the greatest writers who have ever lived (and died); Google, Dictionary.com, iPhone; Sleeping dog, indifferent cat, supportive third wife; Eight years of The New Yorker stacked on every available dusty surface; Picture window; Bucolic setting; Liberal arts degree from a Pennsylvania state college.

Lamps, photographs, framed art. Unlimited coffee less than 20 feet away…

Viscerally speaking, I have only one excuse–nothing is funny to me these days. I’m just not feeling it. I stare at the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest every week and no juice. Nada. Zilcho. I hate Seinfeld anymore. Larry David, too. What a schmuck.

“Have you written anything today?” she asks from the other room. The television room across the hall where fallen stars dance and more desperate housewives than mine (I would hope) plot their own nefarious outcomes.

“Yes. The electric bill,” I say. “I wrote a check for the electric bill.” Ha ha funny.

“What about the mortgage?” On a different subject now. Diversion from the creative to the financial. Not very funny. (What she really means is ‘have you sold any real estate lately?’)

Good question. What about the mortgage? We’re being triple escrowed by our lender because the Cook County Tax Assessor’s office incorrectly recorded our deed while in a land far, far away called Reality, the whole banking industry is in a wind sheared tailspin. I look at the Due Notice.

“Too many digits,” I say, really wanting to run it through the shredder. “I’ll do that tomorrow before I work on my book. We have until the 15th.” Like something magical is going to happen between now and the ides of procrastination. An economic recovery package perhaps. Not even Ha ha. Barely LOL.

“How is the book coming?” she asks. Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I was installing a new Genie garage door opener one Friday evening on my very first house back in 1980-whatever. Basking in ‘pride of ownership’ and eager to….

Pause.

Deep breath.

Now, let’s be honest Mr Petro… (inner voice)

Okay. Let me begin again:

I was spending an entire weekend trying to replace an old Genie motor with a new one I had purchased, on a dump I never should have bought in the first place, with just a screwdriver, a hammer and some vice-grips; the Holy Trinity for those of us born without the dominant handyman gene. This was back in a time before Fixer-Upper actually meant Tear-Down but I was a young insurance salesman born with the recessive sucker gene so what did I know? Rookie sales guys are the biggest suckers. Everybody knows this. My Realtor certainly did.

And to this day I’m still not sure if she was actually my Realtor. She shanghaied me from her Open House I’d happened upon one Sunday, hustled me into the back of her 2-door Caddy (the passenger side front seat was stacked with MLS binders the size of phone books, briefcases, and boxes of direct mail envelopes. Piles of loose, legal length paperwork and blue carbon sheets rose from the floorboard to the glove box) and shot me over to another, much cheaper Cape Cod on the northeast side of Baltimore, blowing cigarette smoke in my face the rest of the afternoon and staring me down in silence until I signed the paperwork in her office and wrote an initial earnest money check to her brokerage firm. I was nowhere near my car or I would have run like Updike’s Rabbit but like I said earlier, I was shanghaied.

Truth is, had I hung on to the place (I shuffled it off to another sucker 24 months to the day later; old tax code) it would have been paid off a few years ago and worth about $350,000 today for the land value alone. I paid $65,000 and almost cried every month the $495 mortgage payment was due. Now, I do cry every Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Now where was I…? Oh yeah, poking fun at my fellow real estate consorts for exhibiting groveling-like behavior in a buyer’s market. But that was three weeks ago and as we all know, a lot can happen in 21 days. It was also the last time I personally wrote a deal or, for that matter, even had a legitimate buyer in my car.

In 21 days they say a person can break a habit, create a habit or change a behavior. In 21 days most solid citizens should be able to negotiate a real estate offer, secure a mortgage commitment, and receive a clear to close letter from their lenders (one would think). In 21 days a well priced property, even in a lukewarm urban market like Chicago, should have at least one decent showing (ditto the above sentiment). In 21 days, the average household fly has experienced its entire lifespan without even having a genetic shot at morphing into a butterfly– unlike his other, more birth privileged fellow insect, the caterpillar. And in the blink of an eye (plus 21 days, give or take) and a thimble full of fate, it can all change…

My parents were married 10 years before I came along–that’s how they always put it; “…then you came along,” which I was cool with, mind you. No therapy issues here. As a youngster I had this imaginary vision of me arriving on some sort of astral boxcar that just came along; hungry and unshaven, in need of a drink and a smoke (lot’s of black and white TV watching in those early years)…God then drops me (already, a somewhat old soul, I’m supposing, thus the alcohol and tobacco hobo reference) into the Petro family just as they were clearing the dishes from the proverbial dinner table a good 10 years after the metaphoric dessert was served. I also have two younger sisters who apparently, just came along as well. According to the little bit I know about quantum mathematical statistics, all three of us could have just as easily been caterpillars, Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

In the 1968 movie adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, Ned Merrill (portrayed by Burt Lancaster) stands on a neighbor’s poolside terrace in Speedos, gazes out at the Westport, Connecticut suburban landscape, and contemplates swimming across all the backyard pools in the upscale valley to his own grand residence and waiting family, somewhere on the distant horizon of his rapidly waning psyche.  As he proceeds on this symbolic journey throughout the running time of the film, Merrill’s unfortunate personal tale unfolds and the viewer bears witness to an allegorical undoing of a once flush ad agency man (total 1960’s protagonist profession) who has obviously come upon more pressing, dire circumstances in recent months. In the final scene we find a shivering Merrill/Lancaster grasping the rusty gates of a boarded up estate, his own foreclosed home, in total mental cataclysm, alone, and with no apparent hopes of redemption.  Judging from the total nothingness he is left with in these last crumbling moments of the story, he obviously cheated on his wife.

I made reference to this very film just last Friday as my Buyers and I pulled up to a padlocked, once grand executive residence in an affluent neighborhood of Northbrook, Illinois. Before us stood 4,000 square feet of rambling, rat bitten, mold ridden, and overgrown memories plotted on a once bucolic, but irregular, single story setting. The original white exterior clapboard is now green and soaked with moisture, the cedar shingle roof sagging like a sway-backed horse. Shards of broken glass and rusted carriage bolts from half-hanging shutters lay strewn across slick mossy patio pavers while the kidney shaped swimming pool, abandoned except for 5 feet of rubbish and tree limbs and swamp water, sinks quietly into the back corner of the overgrown trapezoid. Ghosts of a late 1960’s cocktail party society hang from the gray, weathered latticework and peer out from the tilting gables above the gutterline; their faint voices and forgotton laughter lacing the early summer breeze. A single wind chime dances somewhere in the backgound.  What a dump.

“Somebody definitely cheated on someone,” I say as I wedge the entry key into the oxidized padlock. The house is not only a foreclosure, it is a foreclosure of a foreclosure.  Literally.  A whole lot of things have to go wrong for something like that to happen.

My Buyer and his wife just stare at me and the house in silence. It definitely showed better on the MLS, I conclude.

“The Swimmer, with Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I stare in wonderment at my mail; not my e-mail—that constant leaky faucet of unfiltered real estate industry drip, male performance and enhancement spam, and odd social bric-a-brac from people with whom I occasionally exchange pleasantries—but my real mail. My U.S. Postal mail. The mail that Roger, my letter carrier, donned in his crisply pressed blue striped government issue uniform and pith helmut, delivers at or around 10 o’ clock each morning, except Saturdays. That’s how he likes to be referred to, or so I surmised from the money-holder envelope/holiday note he left in our mailbox last December…
 
To:        The Petros and The Klopeks

Re:        Merry Christmas 

From:   Roger, your letter carrier.

The Klopeks are our next door neighbors (three generations, mostly female, under one roof) who sold me and my wife the house we currently live in. I actually deliver their mail a few days a week because after almost a year in the neighborhood, Roger still doesn’t understand the property changed hands and we are not all one big happy Italian/Polish family sharing two houses on the same oversized lot, although we’ve all told him as much on more than a few occasions–the Klopeks and the Petros both. In defense of him though, the property was subdivided at the settlement table last August (where Roger was not present) with the main house (The Petros) and the coach house (The Klopeks) receiving separate PINs.  Anyway, Roger is a super-genius compared to the folks at the City of Chicago Assessor’s Office who, after an equal span of monthly correspondence and phone calls, likewise can’t figure out the difference between a Petro and a Klopek. I tip them nothing at Christmas.

Roger is clearly not of this Midwest culture but rather from the Philippines, or Singapore, or some Pacific Rim territory where dentistry is not a component of the universal health system and where the name ‘Roger,’  I suppose, is American for something else, and extended families are the norm rather than the exception. My father (who doesn’t live with us) has a Dell customer service rep, also named Roger, assigned to his extended service account who is definitely from, and still in, the Philippines.  Then there was the fellow behind the Hertz counter in Honolulu last Thanksgiving but as I think back now, I’m pretty sure his name may have been Patrick–but Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’m pretty sure the simple fear of  ‘getting caught’ has kept me from doing a whole myriad of things other braver, but perhaps, less ethical men have done with impunity. Take the dirty cop trials going on in Chicago this week where 10 city policemen have decided to come forth to reveal their own bad behaviors–various unlawful acts performed at the arrest scene to ensure ‘the criminal’ doesn’t escape Justice–acts mostly surrounding issues of probable cause, search, seizure, and varying degrees of Miranda indiscretions (for the greater good of the community as a whole, they claim); little white lie kinds of cop acts like you see on Law and Order every night—bum-bum…  “These are their stories.” Northwestern University professor Jona Goldschmidt refers to this seemingly justified behavior as “Noble Corruption.”  I personally am too fearful to be nobly corrupt or even run-of-the mill corrupt for that matter.  And some days it’s the only redeeming thing I can say about myself…

“Hey guy,” as I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, “at least you’re not corrupt.”  Good thing I’m not a cop, I suppose. Too bad I’m a Realtor.

“Sorry Mrs Climbladder, but I’m fairly certain I’ve taken an NAR Oath of Ethics or at the very least, checked a box admitting to as much on my quarterly dues coupon. They always cash the check so I guess I’m in.  Anyway,  I couldn’t possibly recommend that you move forward on this Inspection Punchlist Nightmare the listing agent is calling an REO. You have the right to remain silent…”

I bring this up because for the third time in as many weeks, I’ve advised a client against moving forward on a property I felt was a dog; and not a Bloodhound dog either. A mutt. And not a lovable mutt either. A dirty old smelly mean three legged junkyard people killing mutt. A beast, actually. An upside down, sideways beast. With fleas.

I heard a self-proclaimed bottom feeding foreclosure poacher on NPR the other day state that he was actually doing a service to the neighborhood as a whole by preying on the misfortunes of the disamortized few.  And while I think I might even concur with him on some level, I’m way too afraid Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’m a mutt, I’ll admit it–half Italian, half Heinz 57, solid C average across the board–any board.  No papers. I may have been a little smarter (transcript wise) had I attended easier schools in the early years but hey, I was always a low hanging fruit grabbing kind of guy.  I was born in Levittown, Pennsylvania where they planted a low hanging fruit grabbing tree in every front yard, for crissakes. It was included in the $9,999 List Price along with a garden hose and a rose bush.  Environmental Determinism, I argue.

My parents stood in line to buy their asbestos and plywood dream home, along with every other aunt and uncle in the Petro family, back in the early 1950s.  I, my one sister, and at least 17 of my 27 first cousins, were all conceived under identical roofs over identical floorplans and given the limited TV Guide lineup of that particular era, possibly with the same program airing on the tube during many of our respective magic moments…as it were. Reruns, Vatican I et al…

This inauspicious start in life is not to imply that I don’t have good taste; or an appreciation of the finer things in the universe; or a penchant for all treasures classic, or rare, or unique. On the contrary, I love all those things. I embrace the perfect example of anything. I’m all about pinnacles. (I may even suffer from a little pinnacle envy, if you must know.)  I’m just saying…putting it out there, as it were…that I may not be a 100% blue blooded, redbone Bloodhound.  Somewhere along the line, I misplaced my registration, or forgot to apply, or didn’t qualify by the published AKC Flemish Hound Standard as follows:

Temperament: Extremely Affectionate. (Points taken off immediately)

Expression: Noble and Dignified. (Ditto)

Gait: Elastic. (I can see that. Give me a point)

Weight: Male–90-110 LBS. (Whack me double)

Head: Narrow in proportion to its length.  (See where I’m going with this?)

We all saw the You Tube video. My big fat head is not narrow or proportionate to anything. As I told  Don Reedy, my table mate and new BFF at Unchained,

“I look like my grandfather. He was a butcher. Five foot nothing and bald as a polished walnut.”  Not Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

It’s a game of beauty 

I would imagine that most writers in this country,  urban and rural alike, have at least one good baseball story they like to tell. It is, after all, a near perfect game worthy of a passing glance if not downright close examination by anyone with a penchant for detail and statistics. Sportsman, spectator, or otherwise, there’s got to be one decent yarn in all of us when it comes to this beloved pastime. 

Baseball. It’s a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk in a summer dress. It’s first love at first sight in May, the smell of  freshly cut grass in June and puppies in a box for a dollar–‘free’ of course, to a good home, anytime. It is watermelon in July and root beer in August. It’s the September State Fair when you’re eight and knowing God when you’re eighty.  It is a million square miles of America. 

My first Chicago apartment was three blocks east and 52 stories above the left-center alley bleachers of historic Wrigley Field. Alone and new to the city, there were many evenings during that 1996 season when I would simply gaze out above the cityscape of streets and gangways, elevated rail tracks and brown brick walk-ups that separated my high-rise dwelling from the Friendly Confines, and mentally recreate my own destiny, repairing my past with fantasy and grandeur. I’d stare westward into the lights listening to the bellows of the stadium, imagining the thrill of playing at such a level, in such a venue—that near perfect game of summer. From my soft-lofted perch I’d mentally motor around the base paths like a finely tuned sportscar and fire clothesline ropes from center to home with my rocket gun; above the cutoff man, without a bounce, and just before the collided tag out at the plate…I’d drink til the next morning with the catchers and ignore the pitchers and rookies. I’d negotiate my own contracts and wear my pants down low and hardly ever shave my jaw. 

Chicago Cubs pitching coach and veteran Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins lived in the same building that summer as did a handful of players who were always coming up and down from the Minors throughout the roller coaster season. The Fergie I observed was a quiet man; a towering figure, usually in a cowboy hat, jeans and boots who kept a tight smile on his face and a U-Haul trailer in the parking space next to mine Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I DON’T THINK SO (at least I’m not bringing my leash).    See you all at the paragon.

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I once knew an eccentric, rather secretive old movie buff named Don who could determine if a flick was going to be a stinker just by the musical score playing during the opening credits. “If a film starts off with a single instrument playing; one guitar strumming, one piano twinkling, one horn of any kind–I get up immediately and demand my money back from the ticket booth,” he insisted.  “The movie’s gonna stink.”

“Not quite sure I’m following you, Don” I remember glibly saying to him the first time we had this conversation. After all, I too considered myself a surveyor of cinematografo arte.  I paused for a moment before continuing, treading lightly onto this oddfellow’s little patch of expertise. I had been forewarned not to let the dyed gray temples and Hawaiian shirt and sandals fool me. Not even in December.

“What about Brian’s Song?” I asked, tossing a sentimental softball to the old guy.

“Stinker.” Don.

“Love Story?” The set-up.

“Open a window.”  Don.

“The Godfather?” Brushback.  A little chin music.

“Brando isn’t even Italian. Please...” Definitely Don (if not Corleone).

It was difficult not to judge the man for his quirky appearance and curious ways, or to predict how he would or would not respond to any particular topic.  A gentleman bachelor of sorts and lifelong Chicago resident, Don owned a tiny, ‘evenings only’ coffee house (called Don’s) where myself and a few close buddies would occasionally pass the remaining hours of late 1999 (and possibly existence if the worse case Y2K  scenario played out as predicted). And perhaps ‘owned’ is the wrong word anyway. After all, Don never really ever owned anything. None of us do, according to him.

Our little man group, bachelors of various sorts in our own rights at that juncture in life, would trek north and westward on Public Transit (as to save our respective vehicles from vandalism, theft, or fire bomb in the Gangster Disciple controlled ‘hood) to the tiny storefront; single and alone in its own right, tuck pointed away between tenement walk-ups and elevated train trestles, to engage in heightened conversation, cigarette smoking, and Scrabble with coffee, cake, and dictionaries–the only way to play the game as far as I’m concerned. And of course, for gentleman Don and his quirky points of view on all subjects great and small, including the ‘stranglehold’ of real estate.

“Buying property is for suckers.” Don, circa 1999.

Some old, scratchy LP or Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I was wandering through a funky used record shop the other week, checking out the price per square foot in the 1890’s boutique storefront (but really hoping to get lost in my distant past), when I heard the voice for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. It was a voice that has been famously described as sounding “…like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.” I stood without motion as I was drawn in by the familiar guttural sonnets dripping through the scratchy piped-in speakers of the tiny alley store with its 14 foot tin ceilings, whose lease, according to my listing sheet, would expire in less than a month. At that moment, I have to admit, I felt more like a nostalgic sap with a $50,000 line of credit than a realtor on a due diligence assignment.

An acrid Chex mix of sad, ironic and romantically laced phases cured in a molasses melody of piano riffs, circus tent trombones, and tubas thickened the air for several minutes at a time before being snuffed out between tracks into an imaginary ashtray of half-smoked Chesterfields.  And then, like the unnamed but ubiquitously published critic wrote so many years ago,  ‘run over by a car.’  More than likely, an Ol’ 55, if you’re still following my drift. 

The young guy behind the antique glass counter wanted to sell me an evenly worn Tom Waits vinyl disk, just like the one I used to own, for “$20 US.”  I told him I didn’t have a turntable anymore, or a tape player of any kind, or even a decent set of speakers worth mentioning although I did have a CD player in both of my rides. He shook his head and gave me a funny look as if to say, “Dude, nobody listens to CDs anymore.”  Or maybe he was just high. I know I probably was at his age. He was talking very loud because I was wearing those ear buds tethered with white wire that everyone walks around with these days and probably just assumed I was simultaneously listening to my iPod while checking out what was left on the picked over record racks; you know us 50-something, multi-tasking, Baby Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’ve heard tell that a baby’s first post-partum sensation is a visceral experience of himself and his mother as One. Thus, being too new in Life to yet separate himself from the outside world, little baby Geno mentally concludes mommy and he are the exact same entity. And when the light bulb finally does go off in the infant’s bald little noggin a few months down the lifeline and he realizes he’s been maternally duped by Nature, the very first ‘Separation Anxiety’ is then experienced and all future disappointments in his ensuing  mortal journey can be traced back to that very instant. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Either that or I dreamt it in one of my other, more enlightened lives when I wasn’t so monetarily attached to my livlihood.

I’ve also read somewhere that when one person moves to thumb down, and snap the mutual wishbone, ending a personal or business relationship abruptly, that the mental decision was made long before the actual ax hit the proverbial turkey’s neck; that the severing party (axer) grieving period had already begun long before fatal action was actually taken and thus, comes off as being the more ‘heartless’ of the separated duo. The turkey (axee), on the other hand, is cast immediately into a state of shock and is forced to run around ‘headless’ and very quickly come to terms with his own extremely short future as a team member in this world.  Somewhere between these first two paragraphs lies my point (allow me a few moments to dig it out as I simultaneously fret over a handful of my difficult Listings with a combined market time of almost 3 years) but I can tell you right now; headless, heartless, whatever…I’d rather be the axer than the axee.

I thought about this quite a bit as I escaped the silent treatment market torture in Chicago and flew home to visit with my 80 year old parents over Easter weekend. As I walked through their front door I was instantly greeted by a lifetime of childhood reminders, familiar tastes and nearly forgotten episodes. I sat there for hours keeping company with the two people I’ve known longer than any two souls on this earth, wondering where all the time went. I told them I felt so different lately, with barely a speck of child left in my psyche. They Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

You Know I Had To Say Something…

To read me is to know me and if you’ve read me before then you already know that I am no economist. Far from it.  I can reduce by 10% and multiply by 5%–the two basic math skills needed to be a realtor in Chicago–but anything much beyond that, I start spelling out the numbers instead. If I had to rely soley on the mathematic portion of my brain to come up with D’enouement in any given circumstance, then I’d be wandering the halls of Pi purgatory, ad infinitum. See, I just did it.

Nor am I now, or have I ever been, a candidate for political office of any kind although one entry on Google claims I was once the Treasurer for a Virginia chapter of the Knights of Columbus in 1993-94. (I will state for the record right here in a national forum that I don’t know what happened to that Bingo money but hookers were definitely not involved.)  In fact, according to Sister Mary Timothy from the old neighborhood, I ceased even being a Catholic after I got caught smoking in the Girls bathroom with Melanie Mortimer back in the 6th grade.  My blanket response to both of these scenarios is this—-and I paraphrase G. Gordon Liddy from his Watergate days,  “Much beyond that, Senator…at those particular points in time,…to the best of my knowledge,….I don’t recall.”

However, I am not completely without opinions.  And if I should ever find myself in such a position, my iPhone is sure to ping me otherwise. Such was the case this past Monday as I topped off my Mini Cooper, silently cursing any and all things OPEC, and wondering if I should have bought an even smaller form of transport.  The MSNBC feed alerted me that a notable politician admitted to paying $1,000 per hour for the services of a jezebel.  I just paid $39.79 for a tank of Premium,  then quickly figured (with the help of my iCalculator, of course) that alas…Super Premium was a mere $960.21 more.  As I read on, I imagined the following Govenor’s Mansion pillow talk later that evening in far, far away Albany:

First Lady of NY:  “You paid $1,000 per hour for a hooker?”

Govenor of NY:   “Yes Read more