You Can Leave Your Hat On

Yes, yes, yes...it's a red letter November day indeed and I think we all know what I'm referring to. (It begins with Cha and ends with nge, I have heard) Cruising south on LSD (that's Lake Shore Drive in Chicago-speak to all you squares) I suddenly found myself crawling through the bumper-to-fender pre-ceremonial sprawl that is surrounding the assumed presidential post victory festivities at Grant Park tonight. There is predicted to be a million man march; one that will actually have a million men who show up. A million woman, too, from what all my lady friends are telling me in their morning coffee blogs about town.

I put on my snoop scoop lid (see picture above), jumped into my urban assault vehicle, and pushed south (and left) to the other side of Madison where all things Hyde Park await the good (and last) word from the 2008 polling contingent. I even had NPR on the radio providing some nice liberal background noise to soothe my troubled brainwaves.

Still undecided, I squeezed into a sardine can spot in front of a high rise at 4800 South Chicago Beach then proceeded to show a half dozen Short Sales and Foreclosures before deciding on the least imperfect one with my client. We wrote an Offer on the spot.

As luck would have it, we weren't the only buyers with that same idea on this super Tuesday. I didn't even have time to take off my hat, it seemed, before we got bumped from the deal and escorted to the street with the rest of the evictees. We grabbed our cells phones and chattered away in opposite directions for fifteen minutes of re-grouping and number crunching. We re-figured the odds and break even points. My client took a deep breath and decided to go with Plan B, second runner up in a beauty pageant of warts and blemishes, a full blown Bank Foreclosure even less attractive than Choice Number One which was homely, at best, to begin with. The small Condominium was something he can possibly live with for a couple years before fixing up and dumping it right back into the hopefully less glutted South Side of Chicago when things are different in the housing market. After all, CHANGE has been promised. Or so I've been told.


Geno Petro