The $800,000 Crier

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I posted a piece early on in my blogging experience entitled The $800,000 House. Six months later, after discovering I could actually have a little fun with this medium and that people were actually visiting my site on an occasional basis, I wrote a second post called The $4,000 House. I even embedded the same funny picture of a lean-to shack, with good old location x 3 (Real Estate Fodder 101) and literary flashback (English For Amateurs 101) being common threads between the two essays. At the end of the year I was a little disappointed (but not at all surprised) when the Pulitzer commitee didn’t include me on their long list of nominees for my literary tongue-in-cheekiness. Come to find out, more would eventually be revealed…

And now, several more months hence, and fresh off a whirlwind tour of buy-side advocacy (driving internet clients around in my car and showing property every day for the past two weeks), I am finally able to kick back, relax at my writing desk, and fire off the third and final part of a real estate trilogy I envisioned 18 months ago when this whole real estate blogging thing began to make sense to me. My spellchecker is dusted off and the dog is at my feet. I’m wearing my LA Dodgers cap on backwards and my coffee cup is well within reach.  Now, if I can just get my Right Brain to cooperate…

The $800,000 Buyers; Where Have They Gone? ……Wait….I’m stalling. Allow me to digress for a few paragraphs as a brief, temporal decompression seems to be in order.

You see, I can’t write and sell at the same time. Apparently every other notable real estate blogger I read can. Ardell can. The likes of Greg Swann and Russell Shaw certainly can. But I can’t. I am right brained and left footed when it comes to combining these two (to me) incongruous activities. In other words, I have to sell real estate to support my lifestyle but what I really yearn to do on a daily basis is sit at my computer,  write about what I see,  and listen to the radio. When I try to do both (selling and writing, that is), I end up doing neither worth a plugged nickle. I disappear for days at a time, like Ray Milland in that horrible movie except no one tries to save me from myself and thankfully, no alcohol is involved.

I wandered off in a bohemian direction early in life straddling either side of that unprofitable path until the fear of financial insecurity woke me up in a cold sweat one night and partially paralyzed my artistic future forever.  I was 27 with a 5 year old daughter, a wife who would eventually be ex-filed, and a 12 year old Buick Riviera with a bad muffler, empty gas tank and expired registration.  Meta–phor…duh!

Five years later I made $100,000 for the first time in a 12 month period. Everything hanging in my closet either had a Brooks Brothers tag attached to the lining or a white guy on a horse playing Polo. My wingtips all had wooden shoe trees tucked neatly inside. My rep ties were all silk, of the proper width and belt buckle length. I leased my first BMW, bought a car phone the size of a toaster oven, and began buying houses instead of renting apartments. If it wasn’t motivational, I didn’t read it and if it didn’t pay a decent commission, I didn’t sign it. I was soon made manager of my peers and became loved and hated at the same time by everyone within shouting distance of my second from the corner office. “Put that coffee down…coffee is for…”

The only thing I actually wrote, that required any creativity at all (besides universal life insurance policies and corporate expense reports), in that entire period was one well thought out letter to the editors of Fortune Magazine, which they in turn published. It was about ‘Salesmanship’ and how I fancied myself a modern day Horatio Alger. For one week, in national print, I was almost famous. Someone even commented on my letter and I was re-quoted again the following week. Ten minutes after that I was forgotten forever, back in the car with my sales trainees, chasing my Left Brain through the uninsured streets of Baltimore and into the abyss of…

Where have the $800,000 house buyers gone? I don’t think they’ve gone anywhere. I think they are safe at home in their $400,000 condominiums nesting and spooning with each other and coveting whatever precious equity they’ve accrued over the past 4 or 5 years, afraid to part with either lest they awake cold and sweaty in the middle of a sub-prime Riviera night; bad muffler, empty gas tank, and everything else that goes along with that particular nightmare.

Eighteen months ago it was hard to find an $800,000 house in Chicago that wasn’t a tear down. Today, it’s hard to find a serious $800,000 buyer… period. My clients these days, mostly from the internet,  seem to hover consistently (and significantly) above or below this oddly even price point. Ironically, the best single family deals in this city can be found right there.

My wife and I are the only people I know of who actually un-spooned long enough to put our own nest on the market, march boldly into the middle of the housing glut, and cherry pick (without contingencies and only St Joe as a Plan B) a single family Victorian we would never have gotten two years ago when it was lingering on the market for $200,000 more. Maybe this is why writing is so tedious for me these days. My brain is pulling me…

… to the left…and in a presidential year, to boot. (Yikes!) What if I never get it right again? Maybe it’s because I should be out there trying to sell something instead of drinking coffee at midnight, listening to my fat dog snore, afraid to fall asleep myself, lest I awake once again in a cold, sweaty…