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Putting the Fun in Law
Let’s face it — law firms are often considered pretty stale and boring places. Although most things surrounding the law are serious, like big real estate purchaes, there are ways to make the experience less drab and a little more enjoyable. Patrick Loftus understands this more than most lawyers. By taking a highly personal approach with his clients, Patric has found a way around the bore. While most law firms rely on suport staff to be the primary contact with clients, and their clients may not have a single conversation with their lawyer until the day of closing, if ever, that is not the case with Patrick. “Each one of…
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What’s In The Multi-Board 7.0 Contract?
In a couple of weeks, the Multi-Board 7.0 is going to drop, with the intention of retiring the 6.1 sometime in February or March 2019. Though the 6.1 served us well, the industry evolves, and our contract need to evolve with us. Here are 3 quick takes from the new form. 1. Realtors no longer have to pick a mortgage contingency deadline. For those of you who have been in the business for awhile, this is going to feel really weird to start. The new form sets the deadline at “forty-five (45) days after Date of Acceptance or five (5) days prior to the date of Closing, whichever is earlier.” …
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The Multi-Board 7.0 Contract Form Is Coming! What’s In It?
Since 2015, the Multi-Board 6.1e has been the contract to use for real estate professionals in the Chicago area. This year, the Illinois Real Estate Lawyers Association (IRELA) has been hard at work on the new and improved version, the 7.0. The IRELA lawyers working on 7.0 have kept their cards close to their vest, but there are a few details that have been leaked… Word on the street is that the new form will have some kind of appraisal contingency. Honestly, this makes sense, because it’s become standard for buyer attorneys to request that the contract be contingent on the appraisal coming back for at least the amount of the…
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Park District Releases Updated Plans For Renovation of Jackson Park and South Shore Golf Courses
In case you hadn’t heard, Tiger Woods is coming to the south side. Sort of. In 2016, his golf course design company, TGR Design, signed on to oversee the “restoration” of the Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses into a PGA tournament caliber course. However, plans for the restoration released this past June received a mixed response from the public. As a result, TGR went back to the drawing board in an attempt to appease some of the critics. Local residents and long time patrons of the courses had a number of concerns about the plans. First and foremost, they do not want an beautiful course that they can no…
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Spreading Some Non-Profit Love
LoftusLaw is decidedly for profit. However, it is important to give back. Not only does it feel good to give, it is just the right thing to do. Hopefully I can inspire some giving here, by telling you a little bit about my favorite charities. World Wildlife Fund I like WWF, because of their support of professional wrestling… ha ha, /r/dadjokes. Actually, my support of WWF began after a few glasses of wine and a WWF commercial starring some adorable elephants. I was compelled by the opportunity to ‘adopt’ an elephant, although I am not sure the customer service representative appreciated my somewhat inebriated pattern of speech at 11:00pm on…
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It Always Feels Like Somebody’s Watching Me!
At first glance, this picture does not look particularly controversial or even interesting. But if you look closely, there is something extremely important going on here. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has placed a piece of tape over the webcam on his computer. It’s a remarkably low-tech solution to a fairly high tech problem, which is that hackers have figured out how to access the camera in your computer to spy on you. The process of hacking a webcam is a bit too complicated to explain concisely here. If you are curious about the details, I recommend checking out episode 5 of the Hackable? podcast. How you can protect yourself:…
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What Is Airfare Hacking?
Some of you know that I just got back from a short trip to see the sites in Warsaw, Poland. Whether it is a good idea to lose and gain 7 hours in the span of 5 days is debatable, the trip was a great success. The best part is that the whole trip cost about $1,000, including airfare. It all starts with something called “flight hacking.” This is not a complicated as it sounds. There are a few tools that are easy to use, which can have you traveling the world for dirt cheap. Scott’s Cheap Flights The best flight hacking tool I have encountered is Scott’s Cheap Flights.…
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Financial Planning In The Era of Marriage Equality
Everyone should have some kind of financial plan. For many people, this does not become clear until they get married and start a family. Once there is more than one person to think about supporting, it becomes fairly obvious that a plan must be in place in order to avoid bad consequences for spouses and kids. Most financial planning instruments were devised before America embraced marriage equality. As a result, these devices and mechanisms make assumptions about families that, in many cases, no longer suit the real world. As a result, it is a good idea to make sure that you have a financial plan in place that will fully…
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6 Myths About Homebuying — Translated
I came across an interesting article on Yahoo about “Homebuying Myths” (click here to see the article). The article has some interesting information, but there are some things that I think could be added to make the article more helpful. Here is what I would add — Myth 1 – You don’t need a 20% down payment to buy a home. This is true. In fact, most of my clients do not put down 20% of the purchase price when they buy a home. FHA insured loans require only a 3.5% downpayment, and there are other loan products that require as little as 5% down. However, when you borrow more…
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Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing Zillow of Conducting Appraisal Without License
This is a follow up to my post last week about some of the controversies surrounding the real estate website Zillow. To bring yourself up to speed, click here… Welcome back to the post! At the time of publication a lawsuit was pending against Zillow accusing the website of violating Illinois law by conducting appraisals without a license. The Plaintiff in the lawsuit sought an injunction stopping Zillow from publishing its Zestimates in Illinois, as well as unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. In what could be called a big win for Zillow, Judge Amy St. Eve held today that Zillow is not violating Illinois law, because Zestimates fall into an…
