Berkshire Hathaway Home Services named Yvonne Mortirmer, a 27-year veteran of Coldwell Banker, as operations manager for three of its offices in suburban Chicago, where prices have been rising.
She will oversee Berkshire’s Naperville, Glen Ellyn and Wheaton operations, the Daily Herald reported.
After her decades at Coldwell, Mortimer was most recently the director of agent development for Baird & Warner’s Glen Ellyn office, a job she left after starting in March 2021 to join Berkshire.
“Yvonne’s going to be a great resource for [agents], focusing on training and growth opportunities. She will be a great addition to the offices,” Joe Stacy, senior vice president and managing broker for Berkshire, said in a press release.
Mortimer and her new colleagues will be working through what is still expected to be a seller’s market in the suburbs and city this year, Chicago-area agents, including Berkshire’s Brian Pistorious, have predicted.
While Dawn McKenna, Coldwell Banker’s top broker in Illinois, told The Real Deal this month that homes in the city are seeing fewer multiple offers than early during the pandemic-induced seller’s market, suburban prices remain high and bidding wars there have been frequent amid tight inventory.
She expected prices to stop climbing as quickly in Chicago but to remain on the rise in the suburbs, where bidding wars have priced out first-time buyers and kept them in the rental market, which McKenna noted is also tight in the suburbs.
A swath of Chicago’s northwesterly suburbs including Lake and McHenry counties has been especially lacking in new multi-family rental development over the last 20 years, consultants have told local officials.
That has changed over the past two years of the pandemic, as the area has attracted numerous multi-family development proposals. Yet market research performed by Tracy Cross for a local government shows at least 320 units could be added annually across just a portion of Lake and McHenry counties each year without diminishing demand.
[Daily Herald] – Sam Lounsberry