Half Full? Empty? It’s All a Matter of Perspective
Sometime last year, after his second birthday and well before his third, Jackson started crooning “Happy Birthday to You.” The sight and sound of it was simple magnificence.
Am I guilty of seeing profound cuteness in the precocious actions of my children? Oh, certainly. Every good parent is lightened by the same propensity.
But my many clients will protest that I am a fairly grounded person and, if I rave, it is with good reason. Such is the case with Jackson’s acting like a birthday-song wielding Tony Bennett. The clipped cadence and slightly off beat but mostly in tune singing brought laughter and tears alternately.
Last Sunday we had the opportunity to treat Jackson to the first song he committed to memory as we gathered at our Edgewater home on Chicago’s northside to celebrate birthday number three. And with a passel of family and friends we convened beneath a newly dry sky (it had rained from mid-morning until the party commenced and threatened to persist much against our wishes) and boarded Jackson’s Kiddie Express train for impassioned giggles as we traced a circuit down Wayne, over Granville, up Glenwood, and back on Rosemont to La Casa Hilario McCarey.
This year’s fiesta was a reprisal of sorts of what we did last year in that we brought back the wonderful choo choo train to ferry our young and not-so-young passengers for several hours passing the single family homes, condos and multi-unit buildings that make up our Chicago neighborhood. Ironically, finding the Kiddie Express was the first endeavor of what was at the time our new wireless laptop. Sitting in the Argo Tea at Broadway and Barry in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood my wife and I bandied ideas back and forth for Jackson’s birthday. We both agreed that a choo choo train would be fantastic.
And as simple as a google search using ‘chicago kiddie train” we came across our “prey.” So much fun did we have last year, we opted to have the train revisit us again this year. We were not disappointed.
Much in the same way as I have a propensity to see divine loveliness in all things associated with my kids some might say that as a Chicago real estate professional I run the risk of perpetually seeing the glass half full when others may lean toward the description that it is really half empty.
After a week in which the stock market skidded a painful 18% and access to credit was roughly the same as to raising the dead, leaning toward emptiness is understandable. And with pretty much every quarter spearing the flaccid housing market as one of the oxen pulling the national (and world) economy toward places unexpected and undesired, I am entirely empathic to the unease of my clients and other consumers thinking about entering or standing on the sidelines of the current housing market.
But for some the current market presents a great opportunity to buy. I spent an hour on the phone with a woman who called my brokerage today and she, because she and her husband are comfortable with and financially able, likely will place their condo on the rental market to participate as single family buyers.
This begs the question, though, about the liveliness of the current market as it regards listings for sale. With many eyes trained on 24Â hour news stations talking about bail outs and downturns and global recessions, many erstwhile participants on the buy side are simply deciding to stand on the side until the economic environment shifts (or until their pummeled 401ks don’t look like piggy banks comprised of loose coins instead of life savings).
My sense, and this is just speaking for Tom McCarey, is that a lot of folks are waiting for the presidential election. That’s not scientific, of course. But given that our society tends to predicate action on major occurrences, either natural or man-made, it makes all the sense in the world to me.
In the meantime I’m going to treat myself to Jackson humming a few bars of the birthday song and waiting for Lucas to pick up the strains. Fear not, I will keep you posted through The Real Estate Lounge Chicago of what’s going on with the songs of my boys as well as the lyric of the Chicago real estate market.
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