By Joe Bjorklund

When you begin thinking about buying your first home in Chicago, it's easy to start with listings. You choose a price range, enter the number of bedrooms, and scroll through photos.

But there's another question that deserves attention early:

What part of Chicago fits the life you want to build?

That's why I added a guide to Chicago's 77 community areas to ChicagoFirstTimeHomebuyer.com. Learning about the city belongs alongside learning about down payments, mortgages, inspections, and closing costs.

A City of Neighborhoods—and 77 Community Areas

Chicago has 77 officially designated community areas, with many smaller neighborhoods within them. Although people often use "neighborhood" and "community area" interchangeably, they aren'...

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Why I Built ChicagoFirstTimeHomeBuyer.com

Buying your first home comes with a lot of questions. How much can you afford? When should you talk to a lender? What happens after an offer is accepted? And how does the process work here in Chicago?

You can find answers scattered across hundreds of real estate websites. But first-time buyers usually get a small section of a site built for everyone: sellers, investors, experienced buyers, and people browsing listings. I wanted to build a place where the first-time buyer is the entire focus.

That is why I created ChicagoFirstTimeHomeBuyer.com.

The idea is simple: 100% of the content is geared toward people buying their first home in Chicago. The site is being built around their questions, the decisions they face, and the order in w...

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Artificial intelligence is already changing how people ask questions about homes, neighborhoods, financing, and the agents who can help them. For Chicago real estate professionals, that creates a practical question: how do we learn enough about these tools to use them well?

That question is why I started ChicagoRealEstate.ai. It is a place to study the connection between AI and Chicago real estate in public. The site includes articles, reference papers, and experiments that use familiar local examples to make a fast-changing subject easier to understand.

One article explains the difference between information an AI model learned during training and current information it finds on the web. That distinction matters when a client asks about today's mortgage rates, a property's status, or a recent neighborhood development. Another part of the project asks Chat...

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Meet the PropTech Team Behind ChicagoApartmentBuildings.com

ChicagoApartmentBuildings.com may look simple by design, but there is a lot of technology and research working behind the scenes.

The proptech strategy behind the directory is provided by ChicagoRealEstate.ai, a Chicago-based project focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence, real estate information and local market knowledge.

Building a Better Source of Apartment Information

ChicagoApartmentBuildings.com was created to become a clean, dependable directory of the city's major residential buildings.

Each building receives its own permanent page with essential information such as its address, website, phone number, description, photographs and map location. Building managers and leasing teams can claim their pages and help keep that information accurate.

The goal is not to become a...

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I have been researching two words that are frequently used to describe high-priced real estate: luxury and expensive.

Within the real estate industry, "luxury" is clearly the preferred term. We have luxury homes, luxury agents, luxury brokerages and luxury marketing. There is a lot of luxury going on. The word suggests exceptional design, desirable locations, premium materials, privacy, service and scarcity. It describes an experience as much as it describes a price and Brokers use it a lot!

"Expensive" is different. It is more direct. An expensive home is a home that costs a lot of money.  You can clearly see that the Chicago Real Estate market is not fond of this word. Who is thinking : The Emperor's New Clothes

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