New source for rental info

As of this week, there's a new source to help in the search for Macomb rentals: rentmacomb.com. The site only launched yesterday but already has quite a few properties posted.

Rentmacomb.com offers a way for visitors to browse available rentals according to price, number of bedrooms, or name of the landlord. Each listing includes a small Google map, showing exactly where the rental property is located in town.

What impresses me about the site (aside from its Google-esque clean and minimalistic interface) is its thoroughness, even this early on in its existence. (Today I counted over 60 properties on the site, easily twice the number you'll find in a local newspaper's classified ads on an average day.) The site's owners, Jacob and Marcia Thurman, invite all Macomb landlords to list their rental properties for free, either by (1) creating a user account and performing the data entry themselves or (2) filling out a form with the necessary information and snail-mailing it back to the Thurmans. Landlords have nothing to lose, so they participate, and that only helps the database grow more complete. (Because even a "free" endeavor like this has to make some revenue, the Thurmans run ads on the right side of each page on the site.)

In a letter to landlords this summer -- asking for their participation in the project -- the Thurmans explained that they were motivated to create rentmacomb.com after spending several months stuck on their own frustrating rental search. "We did eventually find a house that we like," they wrote, "but we also found that despite the very high number of rental properties in Macomb, information about what is available is hard to come by.

"In short, finding a place to rent in Macomb is a lot more difficult than it needs to be."

Earlier this spring, I wrote about the rentals list our RE/MAX office keeps on file -- an informal list of every currently available rental we know about. That list has never been all-inclusive, and I'm always looking for ways to make it better. As soon as I saw rentmacomb.com go live yesterday, I typed it in bold and added it to the top of our list. Maybe our office will have some luck steering landlords and tenants the Thurmans' way.

Movement of Macomb's top homes, part II

Since my last post (nearly three months ago), two of the high-end Macomb homes I described as under contract have since closed. An update:

1915 W. Adams, originally listed for $498,750 and then reduced to $478,000, finally ended up selling for $458,000 on July 6.


The 12.8-acre property had a lot to offer, including

* A separate 2,100-square-foot building with heat and air. Though most people would probably call it a shop, it was really more like a car dealership's showroom floor. (The owner had an impressive collection of vintage vehicles -- including a red convertible that looked like it had been driven straight off the set of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)

* A real estate tax bill (in 2005) of just $7,410.02. While that figure is high compared to the average house in McDonough County, it's far lower than some other properties that have recently sold for less money. (A house at 1349 Woodland Trail, for example, sold for $360,000 this summer but had a 2005 tax bill of $10,040.60.)

There was another big sale this summer. 1206 Stacy Lane, originally listed for $289,900, closed for $279,900 on June 25.


What will be the next big sale in Macomb for more than $250,000? Maybe it'll simply be decided by whatever house has the lowest tax bill -- even if that figure is north of $6,000 a year.

Movement of Macomb's top homes

A few years ago, I remember reading an article in the Chicago Tribune where Mary Umberger, a business reporter, interviewed a bunch of real estate agents scattered throughout Chicago and its suburbs. Umberger's purpose: Get a pulse on what was happening with real estate in different corners of Chicagoland. The story idea was a good one. And Umberger did an excellent job of finding credible sources in a lot of different communities and writing about them in an intelligent way.

But what I remember about Umberger's findings is how silly they seemed when applied to the Macomb market. One Chicagoland agent had a quote where she lamented that real estate had really slowed down in her neighborhood. Why, just the year before, most houses in this agent's neighborhood had taken two weeks to sell. Now -- sigh -- they took four! (My tears for her formed a dangerous flash flood that swept away from my desk, out into the hallway, and down the stairs to the first floor of our office building, carrying away any victims caught in the path.)

I invite this agent to come to Macomb, where a house typically sits on the market for about six months before selling. And if you're really lucky, you can have a listing last much longer than that. I'm talking years, not weeks or months.

Nowhere is this more evident than with Macomb's top-crust listings -- the sort that are priced over $250,000. Earlier this month, a house at 1349 Woodland Trail sold for $360,000.

The house was originally listed for $429,000, so the buyers got a great deal. But here's the more important info: April 17, 2004. That's the day the house went on the market. Over three years ago.

Other high-end houses are also showing some movement. 1915 W. Adams, listed for $478,000, currently has an accepted offer and is scheduled to close in a few weeks.

In contrast to 1349 Woodland Trail, 1915 W. Adams seems like it's only been on the market for an instant -- even though it was listed over a year ago (April 11, 2006).

1206 Stacey Lane, listed for $289,900, is also under contract and scheduled to close in July. It's been for sale since December 13 of last year.


No takers yet on the most expensive house for sale in Macomb, however -- 14550 N Highway 67 is still on the market, currently at $699,000. It's only been listed since March 1 of this year.

But because it just had a $25,000 price reduction, the place might as well qualify as a genuine fire-sale bargain now.

New grocery store for Macomb?

Ever since Thompson Food Basket at 1600 W. Jackson, Macomb, closed in the late 1990s, this large commercial building has been sitting empty:


Macomb's west-side residents have been without a grocery store ever since. There was always talk that construction of some nearby apartment complexes would prove a tipping point for a grocery store to return to the building, but that never quite happened. Instead, a group called The Crossing bought the property for $755,000 in December 2006 and announced something completely unexpected: They plan to turn the place into a church. The first service is scheduled for later this fall.

Hopes for a grocery store in this part of town haven't died, however. A few weeks ago, this building across the street -- at 1601 W. Jackson -- sold for $565,000:


The seller, Brenner Furniture Company, had been a longtime fixture in Macomb. Now it's out of business. The new owner, S & W Real Estate Management, is currently looking for tenants. Will one of them be a grocery store? We'll probably know later this year.

Remax.com now posts local listings

In one of my earliest posts, I mentioned some good real estate sites where you can find a complete list of every property on the market. I gave realtor.com top marks as the best site out there.

While that endorsement hasn't changed, there's another good site I can now recommend: remax.com.

A few weeks ago, remax.com began posting nearly all west-central Illinois properties currently for sale through agents. (I say "nearly all" with a twinge of regret, but more on that in a second.)

Visit remax.com and, at the main welcome page, you'll see several blank boxes that let you type in your search fields. Once you hit enter, you immediately can begin viewing properties.

The best thing about this system? You can easily email us about any property you see -- even if it's listed by another office! (Realtor.com doesn't allow things to work quite this way; an average email sent in that system is routed directly to the agent who has the listing.)

The downside to remax.com? You'll only see listings by real estate offices that have agreed to share their listings with third-party websites. In computer geek talk, we call this Internet Data Exchange (IDX), which means an office has granted legal permission for other companies to publish the information.

Our office is very pro-IDX. We give anyone with a website permission to publish our listings. Our reasoning is simple: Sellers hire us to market their homes, so the greater the number of websites where we publish our information, the greater the number of consumer eyes that'll see that information. To understand the power of this idea, consider the opposite approach: How happy would you be if all your real estate agent did was take your home's information and stick it in a desk drawer?

Right now there are six local offices that have agreed to IDX:
* Areawide Real Estate.
* Coldwell Banker Four Seasons-American Dream.
* Curtis Appraisal and Real Estate.
* Key Realtors.
* Nye Bouslog Agency.
* RE/MAX Unified Brokers (us).

You'll find listings by all six of these offices on remax.com.

Definitions, please

One of the things I like about practicing real estate is that it lets me enjoy some of the best aspects of my old job -- as a teacher. Explaining things (and, with luck, being a little helpful in the process) can be a fun gig.

Say, for example, that you see some titles after an agent's name and wonder how qualified this person really is. So how about some definitions?

Some basics:

real estate agent - Simply means the person is licensed to sell real estate. Doesn't tell you anything more specific about how much training he or she has.

salesperson - In Illinois, this person has passed a 45-hour classroom course. But this person can't own a real estate office. (You need a broker's license for that.)

broker - In Illinois, this person has passed the 45-hour salesperson course and the 75-hour broker course. This person can own a real estate office.

Realtor - A real estate agent who has paid dues to join the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the largest trade group of real estate agents. Only agents who have paid NAR dues can call themselves Realtors. (That's why you'll often see the word "Realtor" accompanied by a symbol indicating a registered trademark; NAR owns the term.)

Links to school profiles, report cards

If you're investigating school districts -- whether in west-central Illinois or anywhere else in the state -- you might want to visit some websites that compile school performance data.

Start by going here, where you can read a letter from our governor. The letter gives you overview of how the state organizes school district information, then provides you with two links.

The first, the Illinois School Profile, gives you just the highlights of a school -- the attendance rate, average class size, and district spending. You can also determine whether the school has been making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the guidelines set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act.

But if you want even more exhaustive analysis of a school -- and the link mentioned above doesn't satisfy you -- you can also check out the more thorough Report Cards. There, you can do extensive quantitative analysis of how students performed in different subject areas, as well as within different ethnic and socio-economic groups. (Call me cynical, but I have deep concerns about this ethnic and socio-economic data being included, largely because I think the people who care about this information the most are the same people most likely to exploit it for their own benefit.)

Just as universities don't use ACT scores as the sole measurements for deciding whether students should be admitted, parents shouldn't use these profiles and reports as the only means of choosing a school. The information in the reports gives a lot of data, but there's a lot missing, too. What about student evaluations of teachers, for example? Or feedback from parents? Or (best of all) how about some comments by veteran teachers, the sort forming the nucleus of any school's teaching staff, who have the best historical understanding of where the district's been and where it's headed?

Of course, you can't put some of that stuff down in numbers form, the way the profiles and reports do. But that's what I'd like to see, at least to complement the data already there. End of rant.