By Peter Ricci In case you missed it, Freddie Mac announced what has by now become common in real estate – mortgage interest rates hit new record lows last week, with the 30-year FRM falling to 3.34 percent and

By Stephanie Sims Before social media, people who felt like they had a bad experience with a business, whether bad customer service, a poor product, etc., would complain to the company. But now, thanks to social media, these people

Everyone wants more leads. Love ‘em or hate ‘em – you can be using both Zillow and Trulia to get FREE leads. Yes, I said FREE. No matter what your position is on Zillow and Trulia & the infamous

By Peter Ricci According to Pew Research, as of April 2012, 82 percent of all American adults ages 18 and older use email; 67 percent do so on a daily basis; and, for the first time in Pew’s surveys,

By Natalie Terchek Real estate company Century 21 is returning to the Super Bowl’s marketing roster for the second year in a row. According to Beverly Thorne, Century 21’s CMO, the company is expected to air a 30-second commercial

By Natalie Terchek Inc. Magazine ranked the Chicago-based US Appraisal Group Number 319 on its annual Inc. 500, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. It was also ranked the 11th fastest growing real estate company in the

By Peter Ricci Chicago real estate was well represented in the Chicago Tribune’s Top Workplaces of 2012, with both Baird & Warner and Guaranteed Rate earning high distinctions from the paper. The Top Workplaces is an exhaustive list that ranks

By Peter Ricci Lawrence Yun, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, is known for his optimistic predictions about the housing market, and he just recently made another notable projection: home prices, according his projections, will rise by

By Peter Ricci Message boards have long been among the most popular methods of communication on the Internet, but only recently have they entered the real estate lexicon on sites such as Trulia, Real Estate Forums and Redfin –

By Peter Ricci The housing market continued to show signs of incremental improvement in Redfin’s latest Real-Time Seller Survey, a study of the homebuyers attitudes towards real estate in the fourth quarter. A sample of 1,287 homeowners throughout the

By Carlo Calma Laura Stukel, an agent with L.W. Reedy Real Estate in Elmhurst, was awarded the Green REsource Council’s inaugural Green Industry Advocate Award during the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) EverGreen Awards on Sunday. Stukel was recognized for

By Peter Ricci The real estate numbers game, as any agent knows, is not always the most fun of activities. Indeed, pricing a home is a delicate balancing act between accurately valuing the home, attracting potential homebuyers and, of

By Peter Ricci Fresh off the positive financial news from Freddie Mac, sister GSE Fannie Mae is reporting great numbers of its own, with a third quarter net income of $1.8 billion. That income was strong enough, Fannie reported,

By Peter Ricci The Realtor Confidence Index from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) faltered a bit in September, with tight home lending standards stalling the index’s momentum. The index had been rising steadily through most of 2012, and

By Peter Ricci An open house theft in Highland Park has translated into a pending lawsuit for Winnetka-based Midwest Realty Ventures, a Prudential Rubloff affiliate that operates throughout the North Shore. According to a number of reports on the

By Peter Ricci So…what’s next for housing? That’s the question on many real estate professional’s minds, now that the presidential election has finally concluded with the reelection of President Obama. On election day, we surveyed what was at stake for