SVRPaul's Blog: All Categories

It's Masters week in Georgia. This is always a week that I reminence of my background of growing up in Georgia and the special uniqueness that Georgia offers in real estate. I graduated from Warner Robins High school in Warner Robins and later attended school at the University of Georgia -- Go Dawgs! (By the way, congratulations to our biggest rival, the University of Florida for accomplishing a feat unheard of -- the same starting five winning back to back NCAA Championships in Basketball and also the same school winning the National Championship in college football. Something that has never been done in the history of College Athletics. I think it is also the very first time the same two schools played for the national title in football and basketball so…

Barrington IL, located aproximately 35 miles from downtown Chicago offers unique real estate in an area that maintains a rural character. The area is established and one of the goals of the local governments is to preserve and maintain it's natural history. In an area with more then 350 homes listed in the National Historic Preservation district, it's quite surprising to just how much new construction there is in the Barrington area. There are currently three larger new communities being built by national builders in the Barrington area and a multitude of smaller builders that are offering new construction.

One such builder offers over 27 different floorplans with aproximately 5 to 6 different elevations for new homes in South Barrington. Five of these…

The Chicago Tribune announced today that in part of the massive buyout of the Tribune by Chicago real estate investor Sam Zell that the Chicago Cubs will be up for sale.

How do you put a price tag on the Chicago Cubs?  Despite not winning a World Series in almost 100 years, the Cubs have a phenomenal fan base.  Tickets are not cheap and when you consider the performance of the Franchise over the past 20 years to any other franchise, tickets to a Cubs game have to be the highest when you base the price on performance.

My current number on the waiting list for Chicago Cubs season tickets is 43,202. 

Realogy shareholders approve $9 Billion dollar buyout by Apolo Management.  For those of you not familiar with who Realogy is, it is a company that spinned off of Cendant just last August and is the leading franchisor of real estate companies that include the Franchises of CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, Coldwell Banker Commercial, ERA and Sotheby's International.  (Yes, technically all of these franchises are headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey under one building.) 

My wife and I had the opportunity to visit this impressive office building in April of 2005 and it is quite an impressive operation.  While each office is Independently Owned and Operated, each office sends a portion of commissions to this office building.  (I wish I would have taken a…

I received a phone call today from a Barrington real estate seller who received one of our direct mail pieces concerning the importance of the internet in exposing your Barrington IL Real Estate for sale to the most potential buyers. The homeowner went on to tell me that they do not want to sell their home with a real estate agent since they had their Barrington area home previously listed with a Brokerage and never heard from the agent again.

Hmm.. Of course, I had to find out which real estate brokerage that it was and it turned out that it was a very respectable franchised brokerage which tends to have experienced real estate agents. I'm not exactly sure about this particular Chicago real estate agency since they are not based in Barrington, but some…