Chicago Property Management Blog

In working with our 500+ clients and talking to listeners of Straight Up Chicago Investor, I get this question more than almost any other one in the ESA category. Owners assume the law draws a clean line. Dogs and cats, yes. Anything weirder, no. That is not how this works.After leasing over 5,000 units in the last two decades across Chicagoland, I have seen requests for emotional support pigs, birds, lizards, ferrets, and yes, more tha...

I try to stay on top of every proposed change to local rental laws. Not because I enjoy reading ordinances, but because we manage for more than 500 investors, and it is my job to spot what is coming before it lands on them. Lately my desk has been busy. In just the last several months, a handful of towns across the Chicago area have moved on rental rules, some big and some small. So I pulled them into one place for you.Below is a quick ...

People keep asking me the same thing. Why does Chicago not have any World Cup games this summer?The World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet. It runs from June 11 to July 19. Eleven cities in the United States get to host. Chicago is not one of them. The closest games are all the way over in Kansas City.So a lot of folks figure we got passed over. They think the city lost out. That is not what happened. Chicago chose not to...

What we talked about in this episodeChicagoland weather is still creating real landlord problemsWe kicked things off talking about the storms that came through the area.Some places barely got hit. Other areas had heavy rain, funnel cloud warnings, water in basements, and storm-related work orders. At our office, we even had water come into the underground space and had to dry things out in the morning.We also had commercial tenants deal...

I try to stay on top of every proposed change to Chicago's rental laws. Not because I love reading ordinances late at night. I do it because we manage for more than 500 investors, and it is my job to spot what is coming before it lands on them. The newest proposal out of City Hall is a big one, and our owners are already asking about it.Mayor Brandon Johnson is pushing a plan called the Protecting Renters Ordinance. It would be the ...

I kept seeing suburbs around Chicago talk about changing their crime free housing programs. So I looked into why. The trail led me to two bills out of Springfield that no one is talking about. They are called HB3110 and SB2264.Here is the part that surprised me. Neither bill ever passed. But the proposal alone, and all the talk around it, has already started changing how some Chicago suburbs run their crime free programs. Suburbs like R...

As co-host of the Straight Up Chicago Investor podcast and Chicago Landlord Secrets, one thing I always try to do is stay on top of changes in the rules Chicago landlords have to follow. Most people have never even heard of Pingree Grove. Thirty years ago it was barely a dot on the map, with only about 140 people living there. Today it is home to nearly 12,000 people and more than 3,400 housing units. That is wild growth for one little ...

Tim and I hit week 21 of Chicago Landlord Secrets, and this one started with something South Side investors have been waiting on for years: the Obama Center finally opening.For a long time, investors kept asking whether buying around South Shore, Woodlawn, Stony Island, or nearby pockets made sense because “the library is coming.” Then it took so long that the answer started to feel like, “Maybe, if it ever gets built....

It is not exactly a rule. Nobody sits you down at your first investor meetup and writes 8 percent on a whiteboard. But somehow, if you have read a couple of real estate books or sat through any number of podcasts (including, occasionally, mine), you have ended up using it anyway. Set aside 8 percent of gross rent for maintenance. Or maybe 10 percent. Or maybe 1 percent of property value annually. Whatever flavor of it you absorbed, it i...

Property management is a two way fit. Owners are evaluating firms, and firms are evaluating owners. This article walks through the five criteria most good Chicagoland firms use on their side of that conversation, and why being told no is sometimes the most valuable answer an owner can hear. Most owners assume that a property management firm will say yes to anyone with a property. After all, the firm makes money on every door it manages,...