Chicago Property Management Blog

Every Fall leasing traffic falls off a cliff. If you're not leased up before that happens, your vacancy can run into November.The real fix is getting everything leased before Labor Day. If you didn't, you're in this window now, September 15 through November 1. Activity usually picks up for about a week after Labor Day, then drops off. That's what happened in 2025. It's happening again in 2026. This is not new, and it...

Aurora is one of those towns where the rental license program catches new landlords off guard. It's the second largest city in Illinois, it stretches across four counties, and unlike a lot of the suburbs we manage in, it doesn't lean on Cook County's rules at all. Aurora runs its own program, with its own fees, its own inspection cycle, and its own paperwork. They even have their own Section 8 administrator, separate from th...

Tim and I talked about whether Mayor Brandon Johnson’s PRO proposal is losing momentum, new Section 8 inspection standards that could eliminate some of the frustrating automatic failures landlords deal with, and finished with a new round of “Would You Rather?” questions for rental property owners.Is PRO Dying?After weeks of discussion around PRO and the competing FAIR ordinance, the Chicago City Council did not vote on...

Every new investor eventually asks the same question. Should I buy single family homes or jump into multifamily. Both sides of that argument hold up. It depends on what you're actually trying to accomplish and where you are right now.I've owned and managed both. I've watched hundreds of investors across roughly 1,500 units make this decision one way or the other. There isn't a universal right answer, but there are real t...

Tim and I started with the latest developments around the competing PRO and FAIR rental ordinances, including one major change landlords had been pushing for. We also talked about the Federal Reserve’s latest rate increase, what it could mean for multifamily investors, and what we are seeing as the 2026 leasing season starts winding down.Then we got practical with boiler systems, mini-splits, insurance, and a few upgrades that can...

Every week we get calls from landlords with a tenant who has stopped paying. Some have owned property for years, some just closed on their first purchase. The details change, but the tone is always the same, worry mixed with a little bit of panic, because they cannot see how this ends well. Rent is not coming in, the balance keeps growing, and they have heard so many horror stories in Illinois that they do not know what they are legally...

As a Chicago property manager leasing close to 500 units per year, we obviously talk specifics on rents every day, but wanted to share some general data on rental pricing for those trying to figure out what neighborhoods to invest in.Landlords and investors ask us constantly what rent to set on a unit, and most of what they find online is either a stale citywide average or a number padded with enough fluff to be useless. This article br...

Eviction is the part of this business nobody enjoys, but doing it wrong costs far more than doing it right. Miss a required word in your notice, serve it the wrong way, or file a day too early, and a judge can throw the whole case out, sending you back to square one while the unpaid rent keeps piling up. At GC Realty & Development, we manage roughly 1,500 units across more than 100 municipalities in the Chicagoland area, and evictio...

Schaumburg is a town my company knows about as well as any suburb we manage in. Between the condos, the single family homes, the townhomes, and even a handful of six flats we have managed there over the years, we have run into just about every version of Schaumburg's rental licensing rules there is to run into. Add to that the fact that Schaumburg is where I personally bought my very first rental property, a quad near Schaumburg Hig...

Tim is back from vacation, and this week we spent most of Chicago Landlord Secrets talking about Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed Protecting Renters Ordinance.The proposal is being presented as protection for renters, but the bigger question is what happens after landlords react to the new costs and restrictions.We also talked about Chicago’s housing shortage, why adding more regulation does not create more housing, and fini...