Author: Geno Petro (page 4 of 4)

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

But I said, “no, no, no…”

Truth is; I can barely swing a hammer….Let me rephrase that; I can swing the hell out of a hammer but just not in a constructive way. I am not the fixer-upper type, in case we haven’t met. (See mug shot above for clarity.) I probably err to the side of demolition, if anything.

That being said, my lovely wife (and occasional muse) found a possible second home that in theory, could fulfill our retirement needs during those forthcoming platinum years that Dennis Hopper pitches on the Ameriprise commercials during prime time every night. All things equal, he’s my favorite corporate sell out so far this century, that Dennis Hopper.  Cool, quirky and rich beyond words, for sure.

“60 is the new 40,” exclaims my man, sharply dressed in black, The Spencer Davis Group blaring in the background, and looking unlike like any beshaded 72 year old cat I’ve ever met.  And I’m all over it. According to DH, I’ve got 40 more good ones ahead of me. According to his math and blueprint for living, I’m barely 34.  When he comes on the plasma in high def I get a sudden urge to run out and invest in something spectacular before I lose another precious second. I yearn to  join the expedition, or at the very least, embark on the journey to financial freedom.  After all, one man’s destination is another man’s starting point. Ask any truly wealthy person (9 figures+ by my definition) and I’m certain he will tell you as much. “It’s the journey, not the…” whatever.

But the ‘hidden gem’ my wife came across this past weekend, a shack on the Tennessee River, needs some serious attention; more attention than I’m prepared to pay for, quite frankly. She found it on the Film Location site our own house is registered with (unbeknownst to me until a few months ago). And in case you didn’t know, there is a market for short term property rentals (upwards of $30,000 a month–the first 14 days tax-free) ‘wherever motion pictures are regularly filmed near you.’  And guess what? We qualify!  Hell, everybody who pays the $199 enrollment fee qualifies, come to find out.  It’s the Barbazon School of Modeling for overly proud Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

High Body Count

1+1=3…A Mastermind Alliance. I first learned of this concept over 20 years ago during one of many telemarketing seminars I attended as a tenderfoot insurance salesman. I can’t recall which one exactly, but I’m certain the motivational speaker cashed my post-dated check—a sign up now and pay later gimmick included in the 2 week Increased Performance Guarantee.  My office buddy and Mastermind phoning partner Sam, however, bounced his post-dated check and eventually got sent to a collection agency before escaping  the business for good without ever making a nickle, or for that matter, an appointment as an insurance man.

This was all back in a time when I truly wanted to believe that ‘No‘ meant ‘K.N.O.W; the ‘Client’ (person on a list) really needed to know more to make the ultimate buying decision; and a shoeshine and a handshake?….well shucks, “I just want to earn your business, Mr Fencestraddler.”  Somehow, even though I tried to fancy myself a believer, all the sales talk never sounded quite right coming out of my own mouth.  And even though I had long since left the business at the time, I publicly applauded the Do Not Call legislation of 2003 and all the crappy jobs and unrealized frustration it eliminated from people’s lives.

My Sales Manager, a guy named Charlie who initially recruited me into the business, called me in for a chat one morning after three months on the job. He had a picture window above his cherry wood credenza that overlooked a dense forest preserve behind the office. His three remaining walls were plastered with ceremonial photographs, sales award plaques, and framed certificates, all about him. He had an electric shoe buffer next to his cherry wood desk and a full length mirror behind his door with a sign above that read: Would You Hire This Person?

A few months earlier he convinced me to give the insurance business a try.  He and one of his trainees sold me a rinky dink burial policy one snowy night–a ritual in itself that lasted three solid hours and culminated with my signature and a check for the first month’s premium just as Letterman was coming on the tube and my dinner withered to ash in the oven. My ‘belief in the product,’  he said, was ‘the Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

 …Come on, how much do you really want to know?

Dow Off To Its Worst Start Since 1991…Bank of America Set To Bail Out Countrywide…Merrill Lynch Reports 15 Billion Dollar Loss…OJ Back In Jail…

For me at least, the concept of transparency in the media became evident the first time I watched The Wizard of Oz and that little dog pulled back the curtain. I think I was five. Then there was that pre-teen realization of what’s really in a (pick one): Hot Dog, Pepsi, Twinkie. This was long before 1994 government reforms mandated that food labels be readable on a fifth grade level.

And as best as I can figure, transparency in the modern Press probably blossomed with the Washinton Post’s breaking of the Watergate scandal in 1972.  Before that fateful event, editorial dictum pretty much suggested there were just some things the general public ought not know.  Unconfirmed rumors? Maybe. Back room whispers? For sure. But the butt ugly, hot dog ingredient nasty facts? Not so much.

If truth in reporting has taught me anything over the past 50 years it’s that the deeper one digs into a story, the gnarlier the unearthed details become. For the longest time we masses seemed content with mere Orwellian halfspeak from above only to discover through Newspeak (and Newsweek) that Big Brother may in fact, be gay and tapping his toes in an airport latrine near you. Rumor had it that those Kennedy boys would sometimes entertain a whole White House pool full of bikini clad Twinkies (of a different variety but just as unhealthy, I hear), sipping Cuba libres all (Coke, no Pepsi), and splashing about the presidential grounds while Jackie K was off riding horses in Northern Virginia. They say….the Press was also invariably present, in close proximity to be sure, and  sworn to unspoken secrecy in the name of patriotic duty and national security, if not fidelity; their collective eyes all glazed and bleary, no doubt, from looking the other way.

“That was when ‘off the record’ meant off  the record,”  I recently posed to a table of family and friends discussing this very subject after dinner. A moment of silence passed before the youngest attendee, a second grader,  posed a question of her own to the group of adults, “What’s a record?”  Oh Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Eight or so hours and counting until the Time Square ball descends for the 51st time during this writer’s mortally toiled watch; so, barring any behemothic transpiration  between now and the instant I press the Publish button, my work for 2007, as a blogger, is done. I’ve tossed it around mentally for a day or two and concluded that I do in fact, have a thing or two left to say before the expiration dates on these few, lingering thoughts—well, expire; a couple smart snippets, perhaps worthy of a final comment or two, before the twelfth dong of the gong bongs eternal, and I kiss whomever is standing next to me–within reason, goodyear. And so I present to you this year’s final menu, a mulligan stew of left-over thoughts and teasers straight from the mental ice box of my favorite mother’s favorite son: (okay, it’s another year end list.)

1.  Don’t buy any Christmas jewely advertised on TV regardless of how much the actress acts like she’d love to own a quarter carat, diamond pendant necklace from Zales.

2. Whilst everybody in my life welcomes a thoughtful gift and even my faithful dog enjoys human praise, it’s pretty obvious from the looks on their faces that they’d all rather have the cash.

3. The best answering machine message I heard all year was: …”If this is a courtesy call, leave a message and I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience;… If this is a distress call, keep the message short and if I’m not in a worse place than you, I’ll try and help;… If this is a booty call, stay on the line and someone will assist you shortly.” (okay, I made it up and my wife wouldn’t let me put it on our machine.)

4. I’m at a point in my life where I’m actually a little disappointed if I don’t get socks for Christmas.

5. I’ve concluded that there’s no sense in trying to get back down to my fighting weight since nothing good ever came out of any fight I’ve ever been in, anyway.

6. Don’t write a post about a one-armed girl and expect to come away unscathed or get involved in a comment trading war unless you too, are prepared to quit  the forum and flee Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Big eyes
Chubby thighs
Cute as a spoon
Carol Boone

The above little mind spill was my first and only critically acclaimed poem (if you consider scribbling on a 6th grade blackboard a literary forum, and being suspended from school the first week back from summer vacation, critical). I quickly chalked the ditty while ninety-and-eight of my classmates went scrambling into the cafeteria for their lunchtime milk and porridge, those teeming, hopeless non-romantics. The unenlightened are so…well, sixth grade.

The words popped into my head like a thumb snap and I felt at once, an uncontainable resolve to share with the world, my self-proclaimed perfect rhyme. She was the most social of all the pre-teen butterflies that term and had, with near lightspeed and between Harvest moons almost, evolved from her caterpillar larval state into the colorful and elusive Carolboonemus Papillionus. I hated her. I loved her. I would eventually do the elementary school equivilant of hard time because of her.

Actually, it was the cigarettes in my knapsack that got me sent away that day but the poem on the chalkboard didn’t help–the Administration wasn’t thrilled with the word thighs, or that I noticed they were in fact, a little chubby, or that I erased the first two (pretty important, apparently) letters of Pythagorean’s Theorem from the afternoon lesson of a higher grade.  And thinking about it now, it’s probably the only reason I even remember that darn postulate with all those right angles and square roots at all.

It was pretty clear from that juncture foward in life that I would never really be corporate (or political) material, no matter well I cleaned up.  My record was blighted early on. Perhaps I should have just begun working on my real estate career right then and there (it was after all, one of the easier tests I’ve ever taken). That, or started honing my free lance jingle writing chops for the likes of Leo Burnett, et al. Either way, one thing would soon become evident to this perennial independent contractor; no matter which way I turned in life, there stood I…straddling that always present line that was drawn by someone else–real, imaginary, or otherwise.

Let me point out that in the vast universe of the written word, Haiku (5-7-5, so what?), limericks and elementary school poetry rank only slightly above the Nursery Rhyme. Maybe below. You can argue if you wish but I stand pretty firm on this point. You Tube, in my opinion, also has to hover somewhere Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Okay, it’s my turn.

I generally leave the loftier industry fodder for other, more qualified (if not more committed), real estate bloggers to cull over. I commend visionaries like Greg Swann for single handedly forcing readers across the R.E. Web (okay, me) to look up such words as disintermediation, Quixotism  (just making sure), and even Odysseus, although the latter was only because Dan Green told me he thought it was Latin and I was pretty sure it was Greek. At age 51.5 (I know, I know…I don’t look it) and deteriorating, I think I’m just growing tired of thinking, these days.

There are enough talented writers in this medium, I believe, to address all the cutting edge commentary leaving me free to throw lawn darts and lob softballs at all the easy targets, usually people who didn’t buy a house from me.  But something Kris Berg wrote about recently got me up off my rocking chair to go searchin’ for my literary shotgun…as it were.  I think I’m gonna hunt me some Redfin…if there are any left.

This oddly named varmint (or is it a fish?) is not indigenous to these here parts of Chicago but I do know one thing—I don’t think I like the taste of it. I hear it smells a little gamey, and the presentation is…well, a little like a wolf in sheeps’s clothing for my liking. But most of you already know this. You’ve blogged it onto the endangered (if not protected) species list from what I’ve read. And like I said, I ain’t really seen one up close … just yet.

I have, however, perused everything I could find posted on the company, archived and otherwise; essays, interviews, comments–Ahh, the comments and the commentors of the Blogosphere. Talk Radio doesn’t even hold a candle. It was Redfin’s implied (cleverly discoursed in the second person–‘Uncle Sam Wants YOU!’) mission statement though, that forced me to finally weigh in on the subject, placing reasonable restraint of tongue and pen aside for now.

(sic)

Redfin is an online real estate brokerage that puts you      

in charge of buying or selling your home:

• We combine listings direct from every broker with data on past sales & days on market.
• Our local agents guide you on price and negotiate the best deal.
• Our online tools make the paperwork easy.

You get results, not a sales pitch because our agents are paid on Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

The Updikes are here…

Like many Boomers from my generation I enjoy the somewhat breezy entertainment of people watching–especially while on vacation or dining out in restaurants. (Actually, hotel lobbies are sans pareil for this pastime, I’ve found.) The challenge however, is not to be judgemental and this, quite frankly, is difficult for me.

Several years ago I contrived a harmless little game I informally dubbed ‘The Updikes,’ to accompany this casual diversion. It embraces the human characteristics of onomatopoeia–the description of an individual by some physical or idiosyncratic trait or sound, famous celebrity resemblances, or a combination of both. I like to play this with my wife whenever we are out together and grow tired of talking about ourselves.

“Mona, look….the Updikes are here.” She glances over to the door….

In walks a very erect couple with thinnish lips and proper attire. They appear quite Protestant as they chat it up with the maitre d’. The husband may even resemble my favorite bang coiffed, gray haired author. The name seems perfect. My wife lets out a hushed chortle…”Up-Dikes.”

“We should send the gentleman over a Pulitzer, vintage 1982,” I add, nudging the game into the obscure, “It pairs well with Rabbit.” My lovely partner doesn’t get the reference. She doesn’t know who John Updike is. She just thinks the name is funny. She scopes the room. It’s her turn.

“Britney Spears,” she whispers, motioning with her eyes toward a plump, blond haired toddler rolling around on the floor with her sundress over her head. Now that’s funny.

Like I said, I came up with this game a long time ago and have, over the years, excogitated it into a spin-off diversion I refer to as, ’Nickname.’  And while I obviously can’t take any credit for that age-old practice, I do my best to elevate this exercise to an art form whenever possible. Understand that I’ve always been big on alternate monikers. My dog, Elvis for example, has at least a couple dozen alone; Stump, Mookie, Snout and Chops, being but a few. This is also how I describe clients to my wife (most of whom she’ll never meet) as it provides her with a reference or, at the very least, a mental picture of the odd personalities I have to deal with on Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Upon self-examination I’ve concluded; were it not for a dash of serendipity on all the right occasions, sprinkled at just the proper times, I wouldn’t amount to very much in this world. The fact that I was born here in America and not under a bridge in Lagos is, in itself, a divine intervention of sorts. And if you don’t know of that particular Nigerian slum then let me just add that not being born at all would be a a more desirable volition in this writer’s mind.

what I could have received… 

what I got instead…

 

And still, it’s not enough. In comparison to the Bill Gateses, the Mark Cubans and even the Flavor Flavs of this world…I am but a speck. Dust doesn’t even know I exist. Okay, maybe I’ve got more going on than perennial homeboy Flav…

…but I’m sure there are many in this world who would argue agin. (On my own behalf though, if the ‘picture’s worth…’  cliche holds any water at all, I just saved the Recycle Bins 15,000 words.) I’m trying to be a greener man, thus the whole self-examination exercise in the first place. I’m just not a big fan of the color, I guess.

I calculated the amount of trees I saved by not succumbing to print advertising or mass mailings this year–and to honest, it wasn’t that much. In fact, I probably saved more of the rain forest by simply making half of what I made last year but even I can’t put enough spin on that reality to feel that I’m a better man for it. It kind of makes me sick, actually….

Until I hear about a place like Lagos, Nigeria and learn of the pure misery there. Now without getting into personal idealogical bents I will simply say that I listen to National Public Radio all the time, if for no other reason than to get my blood pumping and to know I have an opinion on a thing or two in this world, all specks of dust aside. Politically, I don’t like anybody and since, (according to those who profess their love for me), I’m wrong almost half the time anyway, I can safely go on record to say that there’s always a Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

“I purposely did not go to law school because I purposely did not want to become a lawyer.” I say this a lot to people, usually when they ask me if I’m an attorney, which is more often than you might think. I actually had to mutter those very words last Sunday but I’ll address that particular exchange in a moment.

Don’t be misled by the mug shot in the sidebar. Beneath the Kangol and behind the shades (a vacation shot in Cannes btw, and not my everyday accoutre) exists a living, if not waning, example of the state college system of Pennsylvania; Slippery Rock to be precise. And I can safely go on record to state (since most of them have probably passed on by now) that some of the very brightest alcoholic, if not academic, minds were tenured there during my own concurrent, seven year run; Over 60% of our department’s predominantly male faculty had Ivy League credentials, most of whoms wives could drink the average shore leave sailor under the table. And much like a sanctimonious nonsmoker exiting a smoke filled room, the residual, if not secondary animus, still lingers–even decades later. That, and a knee jerk tendency to counter-respond with a quip when the right moment calls for it.

That era, if you recall, was a big, political, mid-1970s mess and the fact that Nixon was out, the Vietnam War had just ended, and the GI Bill was in full swing, only deepened the already exisitng social chasm on campus. Having not been in the military myself, I had never, up to that point in time, even imagined what it might take (mentally) to annihilate an entire village, (which sadly wasn’t the case with a few of the gentlemen I shared a house with) much less be awarded an all expense paid, four year educational ride, with a VA housing rider to boot. (This however, was the case with everyone in the joint but me.)

And by the way, that is how my veteran housemates all referred to our ramshackle residence; ‘The Joint.’ One frat boy’s Animal House is but another Viet Vet’s joint and we proved as much by renting the basement out to the TKEs for a barrel of beer a month until the town eventually condemned the joint and padlocked the front Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’ve been putting clients into my car and cruising the streets of Chicago for nearly a decade now; the first three years as a leasing agent, the remainder as an actual dues paying realtor. I estimate that I’ve personally shown over 10,000 properties to almost 2,000 different people; a few of whom were clinically certifiable and dozens more on top of that, just plain peculiar. I laugh and cringe out loud (which I suppose would be COL) when I think back on some of the screwy scenarios I’ve witnessed or been a party to. Such, as they say, is life in this big city.

There was the lady who peed in the back seat of my car, the last cloth seat vehicle I’ll ever own. COL. There was the fairly well-dressed gentleman who came in just before the close of business one evening, adamant about seeing one of our rental listings (posted in the lobby window) on the far north side of Chicago.  A half hour later he bolted from my car as I was attempting to parallel park in front of the property–-a free ride home to the neighborhood being his sole intention all along.

Then, there was the transvestite who couldn’t stop weeping because she had just been dumped by her lover–poor thing. I took her into a Starbucks to calm her down and everyone in the place ended up staring at me. And perhaps the most memorable of all was the woman and her ‘attorney’ who stormed into the lobby of our ‘Free Apartment Finding Service’ (or so read the sign on the awning), demanding the ‘free’ apartment.  But to be fair, most of the above episodes occurred in the earliest days of my career when I was known to befriend any man who happened through the door with a need for housing and the first month’s rent to back it up.

My thoughts today, however, drift back to a middle-aged Mandarin couple I met earlier in this year and what they taught me about showing property to people more spiritual than myself. After several times out in the car we finally came up with a very short list of townhomes they could possibly live with (or even walk into, for that matter). They insisted we meet at sunrise to view all the listings in which they expressed any serious interest. Luckily for me and Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

LIFO: an acronym which stands for last in, first out. In computer science and queueing theory; a historical method of recording the value of inventory (Wikipedia)

FILO: an acronym which stands for first in, last out. I may or may not have invented the term but It pretty much describes many aspects of my life up to this point in time. It’s also the name of a dough, an ale house in the U.K., and a clean alternative to the F word when I’m around my sister’s children. (Geno Petro)

Rewind

Let me begin by saying that not every event in my life is a funny episode. There have been a few that brought me to my knees in quick fashion and many more woes that still rent space in my head when I allow them to. It’s just that I inherited a skewed sense of humor from my mother along with a ‘this too shall pass’ point of view. Such an axiom hangs framed in her kitchen to this day. And being the first born in a short but staggered line of siblings, the joke, in those early days, was apparently on me according to the family picture album. Oh, and my name back then was Genie. Little Genie.

…which somehow became Eugene by Grade One. Nobody bothered to tell me this (or if they did, it didn’t register) and I vividly recall the nun on that first day, Sister Mary Timothy (so very confusing, were those hermaphro-monikered creatures in long, black habits), repeating the roll call words, Eugene… Petro, Eugene…Petro, up and down the aisles like a resounding echo (yes, that would be an echo within an echo) off the leaded paint block walls and buff waxed linoleum floors of St. Michael the Archangel Classroom 1A, until she was suddenly standing above me, pitched to scream, the black Attendance Book clutched with gnarled fingers raised overhead…

“My name is Genie,” I believe I said, which was followed by an immediate explosion of laughter from my new found peers. I realized at once I should have taken my Eugene from the old lady, and been done with it.  I swear, I thought she was going to murder me in my splintery, ink stained desk. God and all his homeys were very mean to little children back in the early Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I could see the fan and I could see what was about to hit it. We were all sitting around the closing table…signing, witnessing, and waiting to be paid (the latter being me, of course), when the question was posed to my client by her counsel—an attorney I usually recommend for relatively routine transactions. A nice guy but no Bruce Cutler if you know what I’m saying. He’s cheap, actually.

“Married, Divorced, or Spinster?” he asked my client, looking at a title form he obviously had never seen before.

‘BAM!’ (splat)… then dead silence for one of the longer two or three second periods I can recall in recent weeks.

Did I just hear what I thought I heard? I hoped it went unnoticed as I looked up from the mindless game on my Treo, just three deals away from completing Solitaire for the 100th time in about as many closings. Not a chance.

“Did you just call me the ‘S’ word?” answered my client, a lovely unmarried woman who, with pen in hand, was about to sign the final document and close escrow on her first condominium in Chicago. When a question is answered with another question in such a situation then the next one who speaks loses. We all know this. And I knew who wasn’t going to say anything as I went back to my PDA, clearing the game and pretending to enter something into the calendar, all thumbs in different directions on the tiny keyboard. I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I was listening though.

“Pardon me?” asked the attorney.

I felt like popping him on his forehead with the palm of my hand …”Dumb dog, dumb dog.” The funds weren’t transferred from the Federal Reserve yet. Say something stupid after we’re paid for our services and keys are handed over. And just like the time one of my golfing buddies got caught cheating on his wife, I was also in trouble just by association. (And for the record, the wife was much hotter than the girlfriend, I thought. Either way, she got the house, the stock portfolio and the good car while he was left with the girlfriend and I guess, whatever Read more

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Teach or be Taught

I entered my freshman year in college (the second time) sporting a 1967 VW Beetle with no radio, a grant-in-aid to play Division III football on the crumbling edge of Pennsylvania coal country, and $200 in my pocket from a half-finished summer house painting job back east. I emerged eight years later with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre, spitting distance close to a master’s degree in English, and a 1972 Riviera that served as both my wheels and my address, off and on, for several months to follow. Oh yeah…and 30 grand in student loans, give or take a few deferments. And a soon to be ex-wife. And a kid.

My choices, as I recall them now, were quite simple, really;

I Take a teaching job for $14,000 a year in a Pittsburgh inner-city high school and get buried even further below the rusty Monongahela crust–an option, rather than an actual choice, I suppose…

II Go back to graduate school (rather, stay in graduate school and be pushing 30 when I got out) adding another 20K to the loan tab–albeit a longshot wager as far as any lender with my correct SS number was concerned…

III Or run.

The first two choices were subsequently ruled out leaving me alone in a bar one night pondering Option III… to run or not to run. Run, that is, OR… possibly… pursue what I had ended up doing in the interim while trying to figure out an escape route from those winter stained strip mines of western Pennsylvania… Sales. The default career of all default careers. Knife and pot sales, actually. Door to door throughout the surrounding counties. My first crack at this profession of eating what one kills. And a natural born killer, I was not.

I’d forage the wedding announcement notices from back issues of the local weeklies then drop in on the family homes of the blushing brides-to-be, a suitcase full of kitchenwares in one hand and ten cent daisies in the other. Knock, knock, knock…“Why, you must be the the future Mrs Thaddeus McLelland Stump {pause} Oh…you are her mother? Dear Lord… I Read more