What’s the Best Chicago Suburb?
I have been asked recently, on more than one occasion, what is the best place to live in the Chicagoland area or what is the best area of Chicago or the best suburbs. That is a loaded question!
Real estate agents should not answer such questions but guide a potential buyer to do their own homework. This also gives me the impetus to provide even more information on my website about the areas I work in. I believe buyers should be able to make a decision on where to live based on their personal preferences. But we cannot force our preferences, or opinions, on buyers. We could be accused of "steering," which basically means promoting areas based on ethnic or racial groups. This could result in punishment of paying hefty fines and even losing our real estate license.
Besides that, we can truly only give our personal opinions on different areas that we know. Our MLS is one of the largest in the United States and there are towns I have never set foot in, even after being a licensed REALTOR® since 1983. Even after selling real estate for 24 years, I don’t know every single town or area of Chicago and it’s suburbs and could not give anything more than what I have knowledge of.
What Are The Best Schools?
This is basically the same type of question that could get a real estate agent in trouble. Once again, unless an agent has a photographic memory this is just not a question we have factual data for. Also, there can be many different meanings to what the criteria is for "best" from person to person.
We Get Tested
I don’t think that buyers and sellers realize that real estate agents get tested. Testers can be actual buyers sent out to different agents to test how they treat different buyers. These kinds of questions might also be asked to test our response. Even if I knew the answers to these types of questions, which I don’t, I would not risk my long standing license to give an answer that is nothing more than personal opinion.
Where Can You Find the Answers?
I will be adding links to my Chicago Suburbs Real Estate page (on each individual town), but I don’t offer information on every single area in our MLS. You can use the link sites that I provide to do your own research on whatever town you’re interested in. I offer school search links on all of my listings and my MLS search also offers statistical data and even has a crime rating for different towns for each listing searched.
If you ask that question to an agent that gives you an answer then beware. That is not a well trained agent and might not be in the business much longer. And don’t get angry with an agent that refuses to give you an answer. That is an agent that is professional and follows our standards of ethics and the law.
Helpful Links
Here are some quick links to get you started on your search:
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You can find many different statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and my favorite source is their Quick Facts where you can enter the town you’re interested in. The state page starts here.
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There are many different school search sites. The one I use for my listings is here.
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I have tried finding a crime statistic site for individual areas but haven’t been successful. However, if you search my Northern IL MLS page then each listing provides crime statistics.
I hope to have my Chicago Suburbs pages offer as much information as possible so you can find everything you need on this website, without having to do further searches. This way instead of having to explain why I can’t answer your question I can guide you to find the answer that is most important to you.
