White Noise, Common sense and The Chicago Real Estate Market
White noise.
It’s there. And there. And over there.
It’s the radio playing in my 4-Runner as I veer down Lake Shore Drive to show listings of The Real Estate Lounge Chicago.
It’s the music seeping out of my laptop from the “scrobbler” at Last FM or random selections at Pandora or selected singles at Blip FM or something I liked and wanted to find at Songza.
For years and years it has been the ubiquitous tv, growing ever bigger and larger to dominate living rooms, family rooms, great rooms and what rooms have you in Chicago and wherever your piece of real estate might be. And with the popularity of shows like The Bachelorette and American Idol, it appears to continue to be a source of white noise.
Sometimes apparently credible sources of information are themselves sources of white noise. Take for instance the real estate site zillow as it freely and happily spews forth nonsensical numbers that it says your home is worth today. I thought of this earlier in the week when a younger and less experienced real estate agent affiliated with my Chicago brokerage (mistakenly) sent a mass email seeking assistance with a client who noticed that zillow evaluated the property he was under contract to buy for more than 10% less than the price he had agreed to pay.
The client apparently wanted to either kill the real estate contract or renegotiate the agreement that already had been reached for his soon-to-be Chicago home.
The white noise of zillow evidently had hypnotized the buyer of this Lakeview condo and compelled him to want to ditch the specific information he already had considered in making and consummating an offer.
If I were advising the newer, younger and less experienced real estate agent and his home buying client I would simply say that zillow is inaccurate.
The difficulty with zillow, if you don’t already know, is that it provides what I call a polyglot approach to something that merits and demands specificity. Attributing a value to the home you are selling or the home you are purchasing demands “capturing” local and comparable values, not dropping a fishing net that fails to distinguish between (significant) differences.
If you have read The Real Estate Lounge Chicago blog for any length of time you may recall sporadic references I have made to the process of establishing value. I have done the same on numerous instances in responding to inquiries by Chicago home buyers and sellers at Trulia regarding value.
I don’t doubt the brilliance of what zillow does – to generate a number as quickly as snapping your fingers based on an address is simple genius. But, dear friends, don’t mistake quickness with accuracy.
To the point:- zillow doesn’t distinguish between my clients’ two-year-old home in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago (brick with limestone accents, five bedrooms and three full and two half baths realized to perfection by Materials Marketing Design, full gourmet kitchen with Wolf, Subzero and hand-crafted Amish cabinets and rooftop and garage top decks) from a boarded up two-flat three doors down whose owners were trying to and failed to convert to a single family home from a circa 1955 bungalow a block over from a rehabbed frame single family homeĀ with central air and new plumbing another block away.
Doesn’t make sense to me – does it to you?
Hmm. Without thrashing it out too much I suppose diminishing the adverse impact of white noise boils down to applying another two word beckoning to thought and call to action – common sense.
Whether you are a passionate participant in the Chicago real estate market as am I or your passions bloom in the classroom or the board room or take root in the cubicle or the home office, the means of turning down the volume of white noise is to inflate and make paramount common sense.
When you think about it, this is how things happen. Whether it’s down the street or across the country or somewhere difficult to pronounce in a land far away.
Ah! A groundswell!
Things happen when people come together. Look at last fall’s presidential election. A synergy is established and we move forward, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes lurching, sometimes clumsily, and sometimes gracefully. Sometimes it’s cultural, sometimes intellectual, sometimes spiritual and punctuated by a slender wristband inscribed by a “wwjd.”
Whatever the impetus, movement is the description of the people powering it and the goal achieved.
So what I propose here as I turn down the volume on a delightful country and western tune People are Crazy by Billy Currington is that we wipe the metaphorical fog from the window to take a closer look at how we weigh ourselves down with white noise.
A man wiser than me years ago told me that the first step is to recognize that there’s a problem. And once we identify it, then we can set about tackling it. Bearing this in mind what I propose is that we apply common sense principles from the time we rise until our heads hit our soft, comfy pillows late at night.
And then we do it again the next day, and then the next day, and on and on, living one day at a time until we have a whole string of ‘em together. And then we look back and contemplate the difference a whole bunch of single days have made when considered together.
Yeah, this sounds good to me. And as I finish pulling the filaments of white noise from my ears that’s just what I am about to set out to do. I hope you will join me.
And in the interim, if you have any questions about how this common sense approach relates to the Chicago real estate market, give me a call or text me at 773.848.9241 to commence the conversation.
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