New Careers Site is Launched

The new Illinois real estate career web site is now up and running. There you will be able to find information on a career with Prudential Starck Realtors®, links and information about our partner real estate school, Your House Academy, web links to sites we've discovered, material on prelicense course work, the State of Illinois exam, the new format for the Illinois broker exam, some general information about working in real estate, and we'll be adding content frequently. You'll find the site under the old URL of prudentcareers.com. Let us know what you think.

Simple Math?

A math type question often seen on school finals as well as the State exam, involves calculating a purchase price given a loan amount and down payment percentage. The question may be slightly compounded by stating that the purchaser paid points amounting to some amount without giving the loan figure. Take a question like, "The buyer paid two points totalling $1,400 and had an 80% loan to value ratio. What was the purchase price?" Well, since we know that one point is 1% of the loan amount, we can calculate that the loan was equal to $70,000. Now since the buyer put down 20%, we would want to add that amount to the $70,000. This is done by dividing the loan amount by .80. In other words, if you want to add a percentage to something, divide by the residual. Another typical example is, "A seller tells an agent he wants to gross $100,000 after the brokerage fee. What selling price would be needed?" If the brokerage fee was 6%, you would need to divide $100,000 by .94 to add the .06 to it.

Don't Mean to Harp, But...

Illinois requires that every prospective agent take and pass a prelicense course (currently 45 hours) and then pass a State exam, the uninformed would believe they were prepared to sell a home. Not true of course, the process is not unlike taking driver’s education and then the driver’s test. The new agent is no more prepared to service a real estate client than the new driver is to handle rush hour in Chicago. Illinois Senate Bill 0571 which proposes increasing the required hours and some other improvements in continuing education, etc. was apparently shelved again (session sine die) on January 13th, but change is coming. It remains true, however, that the real training needed to become a real estate professional will come from the broker with whom you associate: choose carefully. At Prudential Starck Realtors we have a mandatory 60 hours additional classroom training for all new agents.

Word Association Keys

Mike Petran, a fellow instructor, and I are going to post a series of association keys for folks preparing to take the State exam. These will be entries like Statute of Frauds -- "Think must be in writing, " or my favorite Riparian -- "River rights." We're working on the list right now, but if you would like a copy before it's posted just email me.