Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing}

If you live in Chicago, you know street festivals in the summer are HUGE here. Almost every weekend you can visit a different neighborhood's festival, hear good music, drink cold beverages and just enjoy being outside.

This weekend (June 14^th) is Wrigleyville Summerfest, the festival that my church puts on every year. The weather can really determine the attendance and this year it looks like we are again are going to blessed with great weather. So for all you Chicagoans that have cabin fever from the long winter we had, come out and enjoy the activities, which can all be found on the website here. I am especially excited to hear Too White Crew, one my favorite local Chicago cover bands.

For the last 3 years, since joining the church, I have headed up the marketing efforts for the festival. It is amazing how the festival is marketed has changed in such a short period of time.

The first year, we hardly had a website worth promoting. I sat at a fax machine for an hour and sent out all of the press releases, who knows if the right people ever got them? We made flyers and distributed them door-to-door in the neighborhood. And we took an ad in the newspaper (a paper targeted at our audience). We had a large sign up sheet posted in hall for volunteers.

The second year, the website got better, we actually starting referencing it on the press release. I sent all of the press releases via email or submissions through a website. I believe we got a little better pick up because the editors could just cut and paste want they needed verses having to retype everything. We still ran the newspaper ad, but not so much for the ad but also because by doing the ad, we got better exposure on their website.

This year, the marketing plan has seen the most dramatic changes with the advent of social networking and web 2.0 principles. Facebook was a big play for us this year, where we created an event profile and had people post this to their personal profiles and from there their entire network could see an event they were endorsing. We also created a widget you could include on our Facebook page as a way to virally get people to sign up for events and know who was coming. A similar strategy was applied on Yelp.com, where an event record was created and community members could talk about it or let others know they would be attending. Our website also continued to advance, although it still stands for improvement, to include transactional functions such as now being able to sign up for events like the bags tournament. The website will also serve as a follow up mechanism when we post the results and party pics. This year, the volunteer sign up is still in the hall, but the master copy resides in a folder in a Yahoo groups page that anyone can edit. The sign up was also sent via an Evite.

I am thinking next year about doing a blog describing the progress as planning for this starts months out. It obviously would be a big boost in SEO for us.

So if you are in the Chicago area this weekend, please stop by! It will be a great time!

For more information about this event, please visit www.WrigleyvilleSummerfest.com.

Click HERE to find out about other festival happening in the city the rest of the summer.

My heart is going out to the people in Iowa right now!  I just watched a CNN video on the river flooding that is occurring in Cedar Rapids.  I grew up in Iowa about three hours north of there, where my parents still live. 

My parents just finished laying new carpet and putting down hardwood floors a few months ago, and 5 days ago water starting seeping into their basement.  They don't have a sump pump, so they have been running shop vacs around the clock to try to pick up as much as they can.  They called their insurance company and this is considered "flood damage", which most people aren't insured for in the area.  So nothing is covered.  The town isn't totally flooded like other areas, but the ground is just so saturated. 

Obviously this is a pain for them to keep getting up at all hours of the night to go empty the shop vacs, but now seeing what is happening in Cedar Rapids, it is just an inconvenience compared to the fact that a lot of people are going to lose their homes. 

I remember the last flood like this that happened in Iowa right before I went to college at Iowa State.  Ames got flooded.  I remember seeing on the news how water had come into the basketball stadium all the way to the top of the basketball rims.  The farmers really suffered immensely, as they will this year.  Unfortunately we are already far enough into the growing season that it will be hard for them to replant much.  Corn and soybeans will be hit hard, as these are the main crops planted in Iowa.  

My prayers go out to all Iowan dealing with the water issues right now!  I hope the weather starts cooperating.  The forecast looks better, but they could still see some more rain over the next week.  What crazy weather we have had over the last year.  From fires in the West, to flooding and tornados in the Central, and now heat waves in the East- not to mention the terrible winter we had here in Chicago.  No one has been safe from Mother Nature. 

CNN VIDEO

Recently Chicago home buyers got hit with a 40% increase in Transfer Stamp Tax. After April 1, instead of paying $7.50 per $1000 when you close on a property, it will now cost you $10.50 per $1000 of the purchase price. This new tax rate is to go into effect April 1, 2008.

The news of this tax increase spurred some buyers to hurry up, get an offer in and close by this magic date. Seems logical that if one were to close before April 1, one would avoid the additional $3 per $1000, right? Not so fast, I just learned.

I am currently working with a client where we hurried to find a home to purchase, got an offer accepted and set a closing date for March 31. I just learned from our closing attorney that it turns out it isn't as important when you close, but rather when you actually buy and file the Transfer Stamps. This is a task that your Title Company completes in the transaction.

Most Title Companies do not go down to city hall after each closing, but rather wait until they have a bulk of closing to go process. So if you close on March 31st, but the Stamps don't get purchased for a few days later, you can be eligible for the the higher tax rate. The end of the month is always a busy time for Title companies, and tihs month stands to be even busier, so the odds that they down to city hall by the end of office hours on that Monday is pretty slim.

What can you do to try to avoid this situation?

1) Push your closing up as early as you possibly can, in order to give the Title Company adequate time to get the Stamps processed.

2) Hire a good Real Estate lawyer. We are currently in the process of writing into the contract that the Seller will be responsible for any closing costs that occur after March 31st. So on March 31, the closing statements will reflect a tax of $7.50/$1000. But if the papers don't get files in time and the applicable tax rate is actually $10.50/$1000, we want the Seller to be responsible for this incremental amount. Haven't heard yet if the Seller is going to agree to this. For this particular contract it represents an increase of about $750. Given current market conditions, I don't think the Seller wants to blow the whole deal over this amount. But, you can see here how the $450 spent on a good Real Estate attorney could easily be re-cooped.

It would be tight to get a new contract in and close by March 31st, for all you home buyers still sitting on the fence, but it could be done. But also wanted to get this information out for any one with any outstanding contracts out there, in hopes of saving you a few dollars.

Despite attempts to block the bill by local and state Realtor organizations, the Mass Transit Tax was approved this week by the Chicago City Council.

In Chicago, Buyers are required to pay $7.50 per $1000 of purchase price for a Real Estate Transfer Tax. After April 1, this Transfer Tax is going to increase 40% to $10.50 per $1000.

The latest numbers available from Zillow (Q3 2007), show the average home in Chicago sold for $242,000. If you buy this average priced home pre-April 1, your Transfer Taxes will be $1815. If you buy this same home post-April 1, your Transfer Taxes will be $2541. A difference of $726!!

So if you are sitting on the fence about buying, now is the time to get the process in motion. Remember is takes approximately 30-45 days to close on a home, which means you should shoot to have an approved offer in hand by Feb 20^th. Looking for something romantic to do on Valentine's Day? How about some home shopping! Let me know if I can help get the process started.

The City of Chicago is pricing us out of here! I hate to rant on a Friday, but the most recently passed legislation infuriates me to no end.

In the last year, here are the major additional taxes that we have been hit with (on top of all sorts of other little increases in fines, fees and taxes that come out of the woodwork ever time I pay a bill):

1) Chicago Mass Transit Tax,part 1- This ridiculous circus act of legislation has been going on for months. Yesterday, they finally got resolution which involves the Real Estate Transfer Tax (which buyers pay) going from $7.50 per $1000 to $10.50 per $1000! This additional tax is being used to bail out the mass transit authority. The alternative was to increase fares from $2 to $3.25. My husband and I are currently shopping for homes in the $700K range. This means that when we go to buy, we will have to pay an additional $2100 (net of $7350) at closing. If the alternative was paying an additional $1.25 at the train station, this means that I will have to ride the CTA 1680 times to break even on this tax. Like houses were already flying off the market, I am sure this will help, thanks a lot. This hurts the affordability of buyers and can carry into the equity stake of sellers.

2) Chicago Mass Transit Tax, part 2- The second part of this textbook case for bad government, involves raising the sales tax from 9.0% to 9.25%in Chicago, and even higher tax increases in the collar counties. It sucks paying 9.0% in the first place on items that are typically already priced higher because we live in a big city, and it sucks even worse now. I love Chicago. I want to support it and especially support local merchants, but personally all this tax increase will do is make me buy more online. The shift in my spending habits became apparent this Christmas when I calculated that I saved about $150 in taxes by doing a bulk of shopping online for the first time. From now on this shift to online will only be more dramatic Instead of figuring out how to trim the fat out a budget, they are now going to get even less from me overall.

3) The Water Bottle Tax- On January 1 of this year the City of Chicago was the first in the nation to impose a 5 cent tax on bottled water sold in the city. They hope to decrease plastic waste and generate $10.5 million in revenue by doing this. I guess tap water was good enough for me growing up, and it is going to have to be good enough again as an adult.

4) Illinois State Toll Roads-It used to cost .40 or .80 to drive through a toll in Illinois. Last year those rates doubled to .80 and $1.60. The relief for this one is that if you have an EZ Pass, you pay the half this, taking the tolls back to their original rate. So this increase isn't nearly as painful as the first two.

I majorly simplified what happened with the first two increases in this post. If you want to find out more detail, I encourage you to click on the links provided. If you want to read the viewpoints of what other people are saying, check out this page of comments that CBS2 is compiling.

This whole situation is a big waste of taxpayer money and I fully intend to remember every name that was both involved in it and voted for it next time I am at the polls.

If you are wondering whether or not our Realtor lobbyist stepped in, yes, they were there. They are still there. They just weren't enough of a force against Chicago's corrupt government systems. Brian Bernardoni, director of government affairs for the Chicago Association of Realtors, made many appearances in Springfield. Earlier this week, the Realtors group pressured tax-weary aldermen to reject a transfer tax hike it called "anti-business, anti-affordable housing" and incredibly ill-timed in the midst of a housing slump.

"The mayor or whoever crafts the ordinance has a wide range of options, which changes our strategy. But, whoever the tax impacts, it's going to hurt. If they decide to impose the tax on the seller, it's stripping equity. If they apply it to the buyer, it'll be tougher to invest in Chicago," Bernardoni said.