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 Barry Cunningham

Real Estate Broadcaster and Investor

Author website

Over the last couple of months we have spoken to hundreds of agents who when asked, most can not easily articulate what they do in a transaction. Yet worse, justifying why they receive 6% commission on the transaction is even harder to define.

More often than not their answers have been based upon mantra-like rhetoric that centers around the ignorance of the consumer. One of my favorites, “I don’t get paid for what I do, I get paid for what I know” is representative of the kind of inanity surrounding an industry whose players for the most part are reluctant to provide great detail into what they do.

In this Web 2.0 world, many who are resistant to a culture of transparency and fear disintermediation believe they are beyond reproach and that the technologically savvy consumer could never do without a Realtor’s involvement in a transaction. The misguided belief that “there will always be a need” for a Realtor is ignorant at best.

While true, there may be quite a great number of consumers who DESIRE to have an agent involved in a transaction, much more for convenience sake then anything else, it is big mistake to think that they are NEEDED in a transaction.

The former implies that an agent’s services are thought of by some to be much like that of a “real estate concierge”,while the latter implies some form of prerequisite dependence. This article is written to dispel the rumor that an agent is needed in a transaction.

So from start to finish I will outline a recently closed transaction.

1. Property Selection: A property was found online through tax records as being owned by a bank. The bank had not as of the time of contact contacted or retained an agent. The bank was contacted and the decision maker at the bank communicated their willingness to receive an offer.

2. Due Diligence: Data was reviewed and it was concluded that this would be a great buy. All of the vital signs were reviewed online and required about 2 hours of time. It only took this long because it was located in another state that Read more