Judy Orr - SW & near West Chicago suburbs

Covington Grade School located in Oak Lawn, IL, held a mock voting program for their students. My 6 year old granddaughter, Elle, attends the school as a first grader. I wasn't sure if all of the children were allowed to "vote" or if it was for the older students. I posted the article in Topix.com, where I am the editor for Oak Lawn, Illinois.

As I was getting ready to go out and vote today Elle asked me who I was voting for. She told me she voted for "the lady." I explained that the lady wasn't the Presidential nomination but the Vice President. I don't think she understood.

I also told her that her vote won't count because she needs to be 18. She wasn't happy about that and seemed disappointed that the voting held at her school wasn't real.

I thought about the conversation as I drove to the Village of Oak Lawn to cast my ballot. I didn't have to stand in line and it took minutes to vote.

On the drive home I couldn't help but smile at my granddaughter's desire to be heard. I hope she carries that right with her until she is old enough to make a difference. So I gave her the "I voted" sticker I received since in her mind, she voted!

Thanks to Bill Gassett's post about becoming an editor on Topix, Judy Orr, a long-time resident of Oak Lawn, has become the editor for Oak Lawn, IL. There were no editors for the village so Judy jumped in (even though multiple editors are allowed).

Judy already added one of her local blog posts about a quaint Oak Lawn restaurant called Millie's Ice Cream Shoppe and Deli. She will continue adding local blog posts and articles for the Oak Lawn page.

Judy invites you to view the Oak Lawn Topix page. Just visit Topix.com and put Oak Lawn's zip code in (60453) to view the page. Prior to Judy's involvement, a roboeditor selected news topics, some of which Judy deleted because they weren't really on topic.

Judy looks forward to keeping the village's page up-to-date and hopes to get some local interaction going. There are forums and many other national topics you can read. In fact, you could spend a lot of time on the site because it has so much information.

If you're thinking of buying and/or selling real estate in Oak Lawn or have any real estate related questions just give Judy a call at 708-536-8200 or use the Contact Form. Remember, Judy lives and works in Oak Lawn!

Friday's Home Section (10/10/2008) had a first-page article titled "A Tale of Two Orlands." It offers a little history, Orland Park amenities and a bit of Orland Park real estate info.

Judy Orr was interviewed for the article as her office, Classic Realty Group, is located in Orland Park and Judy has been selling real estate in the village since 1983. There were a few other locals interviewed for the article and it gives a nice community profile of this thriving village.

The article even mentioned that Orland Park has been on Money Magazine's list of the Top 100 Cities to Live In. I wrote a post about Orland Park in Money Magazine last year. In my opinion, Orland Park is one of the most popular southwest suburbs.

If you're interested in moving into this popular southwest Chicago suburb please read through the article. Check out the Orland Park MLS for all active real estate listings in the village.

I have a beautiful Orland Park property for sale that was a previously expired listing. The original pricing was in the $500,00's with a reduction to $499,900 before it expired. I took it at $489,900 and we quickly got two offers. However, neither of the potential buyers had their homes sold and neither had their homes up for sale. That along with offers that seemed low to my sellers, we turned down those buyers and waited.

The sellers worked with me by reducing the list price until we got down to $450,000. We got increased activity and received two offers in one day - a seller's dream in a market like this. In fact, one of the buyers couldn't believe that there was really another offer on the table. That buyer did not get his offer accepted.

Everything was working out. You see, I sold my sellers a home without a contingency on sale. They took a risk and got their finances in order knowing that they might face double mortgage payments for a while. But they didn't want to lose the home they wanted. So I was a hero that it was all working out.

Then we got the phone call

The selling agent called me on a Friday afternoon telling me that his buyer's mortgage company told him the house was on a flood plain and that flood insurance would be needed if they wanted to close. Naturally, the buyers and their agent were wondering why we didn't disclose this.

I immediately called my sellers who said something must be wrong since they didn't have to purchase flood insurance. They talked to their neighbors who all agreed that someone made a mistake. Being late on Friday there was no one else to call.

I then told my seller that I was going to be out of town on Monday (and Monday would be a heavy travel day where I wasn't sure how much phone access I'd have) and my seller said she would call the village of Orland Park to double check.

We found out the truth

As soon as my plane landed I called her and found out the bad news. The flood maps were revised on August 19th and none of the affected residents were informed. The village of Orland Park told my sellers that they were planning to fight for a revision of the map.

My seller was very upset and was ready to walk away from their purchase transaction as they figured their buyers would walk. They knew they would lose their earnest money and were wondering if the seller could sue them for more. I told them to call their attorney. I also called the attorney and left a voice mail explaining everything to him.

My trip was turning negative

I was so afraid to contact the listing agent of the home my clients were purchasing. The home owner was an elderly widow that was downsizing to a condo. I figured she had already made her plans and this would affect her badly. I am working for my clients but they chose not to use a contingency on their offer and I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I didn't want to be the messenger of that bad news. I was in Seattle heading toward Vancouver Island and had a black cloud over me now.

How phone calls can change everything

As I reached my hotel room I sat down to check my voice mails. The attorney gave me the best news of all. He arranged to have the sellers compensate the buyers an agreed upon amount of money to help defray the flood insurance. Everyone agreed and we moved forward. I was once again able to enjoy myself, although I knew we weren't out of the woods yet as everything was so new.

Another fork in the road

I was back home when I received another call from the selling agent asking for a Flood Elevation Certificate as the buyer's insurance company required it. We were told it would cost around $600.00. My seller called the village to see if they already had one but they didn't. I then got on the Internet and the phone to get quotes and timeframes as we needed this asap. I finally found a company that did it for quite a bit less than $600.00 and was told it would take a week for them to finish it. They got it done immediately!

We haven't closed yet but it's looking good

The buyer picked up the certificate from my office so he could take it to his insurance agency. They seem eager to close. The company that provided the certificate said that based on the elevation he feels this could be easily fought so the house could be removed from the high risk flood plain, making flood insurance unnecessary.

This will affect the entire area designated as high risk

I think that the only residents in the affected area that know are my clients and the neighbors they have spoken to about this. Until the rest of the area gets notified by the village of Orland Park or their mortgage company they won't know about this change.

My clients feel this happened because there is a different subdivision close by that has been affected by flooding in the past. Because of that small pocket FEMA designated a much larger area surrounding this affected subdivision as also being high risk. So now these residents will be forced at some point to purchase flood insurance that was not deemed necessary since their homes were built, most in the late 80's.

And being in an area not expected to be in a flood plain it will also affect future home sales unless and/or until they can remove their properties from the map. This takes time and money and to me seems very unfair to include outlying areas on these flood maps. These homeowners are suddenly being shown as "guilty" and now have to defend themselves.

If there had been past flooding I could understand completely. But limit the flood plain designation to the area that has been affected. Although Illinois is flat land there are lower and higher elevations. My clients feel that the affected area is at a lower elevation and that is why they've had problems in the past.

Now I know about this area but I doubt many, if any, other agents know. I've tried looking up maps on FEMA but they're difficult to read and I'm not sure they've been updated. It sounds like my story is going to turn out positively but that might not be the case for the next seller in this new high risk flood plain area. And it also makes me wonder what other changes have been made in the southwest suburbs since this map revision.

I recently made a post about my first ever Squidoo lens I created on a popular village in my area, Tinley Park. At the time I worked on the lens I wasn't quite sure what Squidoo was about. But I went on to make a second non-real estate related lens.

Squidoo is just another community on the Internet where people congregate to create and share "lenses" or pages of anything that interests them. Some people make very basic pages and some put a lot of time into them. Others even create mini-sites with their separate lenses - something that could easily be done with real estate. There are also groups you can join with lenses of the same interest you have.

About a week after I created my lens it rose to the #1 spot for the "Local" section on Squidoo. I don't know why, but I checked keywords on Google and was shocked to see my Tinley Park lens on the 1st page. But I should have known better. Google tends to take new sites or pages and gives them high rankings but once the dust settles the page/site starts to sink. Last time I checked it was on the 3rd page which is still good since there were over 4 million results.

But unless I spend time and effort on that single page trying to get "the word out" it will probably fall into oblivion. I wasn't trying to get this page on the lst page of Google since I was just trying things out over at Squidoo. I'm just happy Google indexed the page since I do have rss feeds from two of my other websites on it. So if the page stays indexed by Google (which will be questionable) it should help my other sites a little bit.

Will I continue creating lenses? I'm not sure. It's kind of fun once you get the hang of it but I think my time would be better spent working on my main websites. The way I look at Squidoo lenses is that they're great for subjects that don't require an entire website - something about an interest you have or a hobby.

If it's a topic that is interesting enough, the people who "live" reading through Squidoo lenses might find your page worthy enough to continue reading and bookmark. There is adsense on it so you could earn a few bucks if you create a really popular lens.

I don't think local real estate is an interesting enough subject to create a lot of buzz on. But you never know, in the ever widening world of real estate 2.0, I guess we need to get our name out there as much as we can. You never know where your next client might come from.