Top 5 Cities Surviving the "Housing Bust"

Charlotte, Portland (OR), Seattle, Dallas, and Boston according to SmartMoney. Texas has done amazingly well during this downturn...they've been like a separate country during the last year or so of general this malaise.

And frankly if you actually look at the Chicago/Illinois figures instead of the falsely alarming headlines, we ain't so bad here. Beneath the headline announcing a 27% drop in IL home sales the other day was this:

The median price of a home in Chicago increased 5.4 percent in the first quarter, however, to $295,000 from $280,000. Condominiums prices in Chicago moved up a hefty 8.6 percent, the Realtor group said.

Take a RepoHomeTour

Did ya see the RepoHomeTourChicago.com bus out in the NW 'burbs a couple weeks back? Hey more power to them I say...the foreclosure crisis can only fairly be seen as a business opportunity for people in a position to profit from it. The Trib. had a piece on the tours a couple weeks back. Interesting article, what's distasteful about buying homes from a bank? I think if you asked the Fed. Chair about spurring the economy, home buyers are a good thing.

Slow Times for Real Estate Sales and Real Estate Blogs

Forgive me for the dearth of postings lately. It's just kind of depressing in the whole field. I could post the quarterly foreclosure numbers or another monthly or quarterly drop in home sales. But I don't want to be a blogger based solely on secondary reporting. So....

Well last week one residential deal died and one residential new contract came into the office. The number of forcibles coming in both landlord and association stuff has been ramping up as the economy ramps down. And most importantly, the two homes around the Chicago area where I have some $25,000 in attorneys fees pending payment based on the sale of real estate post-trial, no offers in about a year in both cases.

Cook's Eviction Process In "What's Your Problem"

A pretty realistic example of how things work in Cook County evictions in this week's What's Your Problem column in the Trib. The column asks readers to write in about their problems and then the columnist gets involved to help and solve the problem. If you work in this field at all the story of the 88-year-old landlord isn't unusual. She got an Order of Possession in mid-January but didn't finally get her tenant evicted until earlier this week (May). Frankly the article portrays the Cook County Sheriff better than many of the cases I've been involved with. I've written in this space before about our last Order of Possession that actually went all the way to eviction and it took 9 weeks for the Sheriff to appear. Frankly this piece mentions that the Sheriff was out to the property in less than two months but the Landlord wasn't there when they arrived.

Eventually the LL got outside the 90-Day window (735 ILCS 5/9-117) to enforce an Order of Possession and she had to go back into court to get the Order renewed.