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The Chicago Tribune announced today that in part of the massive buyout of the Tribune by Chicago real estate investor Sam Zell that the Chicago Cubs will be up for sale.

How do you put a price tag on the Chicago Cubs?  Despite not winning a World Series in almost 100 years, the Cubs have a phenomenal fan base.  Tickets are not cheap and when you consider the performance of the Franchise over the past 20 years to any other franchise, tickets to a Cubs game have to be the highest when you base the price on performance.

My current number on the waiting list for Chicago Cubs season tickets is 43,202. 

Realogy shareholders approve $9 Billion dollar buyout by Apolo Management.  For those of you not familiar with who Realogy is, it is a company that spinned off of Cendant just last August and is the leading franchisor of real estate companies that include the Franchises of CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, Coldwell Banker Commercial, ERA and Sotheby's International.  (Yes, technically all of these franchises are headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey under one building.) 

My wife and I had the opportunity to visit this impressive office building in April of 2005 and it is quite an impressive operation.  (I wish I would have taken a picture of it so I could post it here but you can Google Map it and get a pretty good idea of just how big this office complex is…

I received a phone call today from a Barrington real estate seller who received one of our direct mail pieces concerning the importance of the internet in exposing your Barrington IL Real Estate for sale to the most potential buyers. The homeowner went on to tell me that they do not want to sell their home with a real estate agent since they had their Barrington area home previously listed with a Brokerage and never heard from the agent again.

Hmm.. Of course, I had to find out which real estate brokerage that it was and it turned out that it was a very respectable franchised brokerage which tends to have experienced real estate agents. I'm not exactly sure about this particular Chicago real estate agency since they are not based in Barrington, but some…