Angela Andrews-Bailey - Managing Broker

We contacted Angela in January 2012 as a possible realtor in our house search. We felt we had outgrown our condo and were looking for a single family home. Or maybe a town-home. Or maybe a fixer-upper. Therein lies one of the issue with our search - we thought we were sure of what we wanted, until we started looking. But first things first, before we used Angela, we asked a list of 20+ questions - are you licensed, do you expect to be a dual agent, etc. - which all went well. She was pleasant to talk to, answered all the questions patiently and offered pertinent information about her, the company she worked for (Baird and Warner) and so on. So, we went forward with Angela and told her the strict guidelines - we want a house by June 2012 with a $150K budget in a good neighborhood and should be move-in ready. You're laughing right? $150K in a good Chicago neighborhood - for a single family home? Well, she didn't laugh - even though now, with 20/20 hindsight, I am laughing at the amount. She said she'll work with the budget and set up the specifications in MLS that we wanted and we started getting automated "hits" almost immediately. In our first meeting, she gave us a binder with school information, pamphlets on lead, radon, etc. and the basic information that would guide a house search. I don't know how many houses we looked at - I lost count around 50 - but I never heard a complaint from Angela. We went from Evanston to Beverly, North side to South, looked at town-homes, multi-family and single family homes, houses that needed work and those that were move-in ready. If Angela found houses outside of MLS, she sent the information to us so we could decide if we were interested; if we found houses in independent research, we sent that information to her so we could schedule tours. We found some "this could be it" houses along the way and made offers. Through the offer process, Angela's core skills showed - she was patient, very detailed and caught items in contracts, disclosures and city assessment checks that I'm not sure all agents would. My only quibble was that we had assumed that our contracts would be written up by default with a request for seller's assistance in closing costs but (a) she added those to the contracts when we asked and (b) she may have omitted that to make our offer more attractive (see above on our asking price). Angela and her husband were our regular guides on each visit - and they might as well have worked for the Post Office because they made it to each appointment on time, through sleet, snow, etc. We finally found our house about 15 months after we started looking and Angela again came through in the back and forth with the sellers until we were able to resolve any open issues and could move forward with closing. We cannot recommend Angela enough if you're in the market for a house.