It’s a familiar talk residential brokers now give their clients: Post pandemic, the workers that once animated Chicago’s downtown and gave it a feeling of safety and comfort have been slow to return, which means if you’re a luxury condo owner trying to sell, the price might be lower than you expected.
After more than two decades as a broker, Carrie McCormick, of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, has developed the skill of the moment: pricing luxury downtown Chicago condos correctly even when that price is on a downward curve.
“When the market’s going up, everyone’s a winner. It’s easy to look good with your clients. They’re making money. Everyone’s happy,” said Mike Golden, co-founder of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate. “But when the market is choppy … it can be like catching a falling knife.” (The market is not so choppy everywhere in the city: Luxury condo sales in various submarkets outside downtown have made a comeback.)
“You want to make sure you’re getting your clients as much money as possible, but you’re also wanting to make sure that they actually get their home sold so they can move on with their lives,” Golden added. “It can be a very delicate balance to walk.”
McCormick walks this tightrope, trying to determine what the market will bear. She also applies her marketing and design background to position each property just so.
“I’m a very positive person in general, and I’m very bullish on the Chicago market,” McCormick said. “I truly believe in our market, and I know there’s a buyer for every property out there. Pricing is tough, inventory is tough out here in the city, but I know I can find a buyer.”
“I have to be honest with them and say, ‘Listen, this is where we’re at with the market. … If you, Mr. or Mrs. Seller, want to sell this home, this is what we need to do.’”
McCormick has been working her way up through the real estate world for over 24 years now, and her name began appearing on major rankings of the city’s top residential brokers in the last five years or so. She landed at No. 7 on The Real Deal’s list last year with $121.5 million in total sales volume across 100 deals closed in Cook County.
Fellow brokers have noticed how she rose as the market struggled. But that’s not all they admire. She has style, too. One business partner called her “fabulous.”
“A lot of brokers, I think, wish they could emulate her,” said Jennifer Ames, broker and founder of the Ames Group at Engel & Völkers Chicago.
Welcome to the top
McCormick underscored that this is her moment when she made the priciest sale of April 2023 — a $5.2 million sale of a 32nd-floor unit in the Palmolive Building, as a crowd of high-end sellers were making price cuts on downtown listings.
Ames represented the buyers.
“For some teams, the team lead — you never see them, they send their people,” she said. “But in this case, Carrie was present and responsive.” The deal went smoothly, she added.
McCormick’s use of social media marketing is “ahead of the curve here — and she is actually setting the curve,” said Anne Shrader, interior designer and co-owner of City Haus in River North.
McCormick has more than 104,000 followers on her Instagram page, where highly produced videos that use drones to capture the stunning penthouse views dominate the grid.
“Welcome to the top,” McCormick says in a video with over 300,000 views.
McCormick knows “it’s about selling a lifestyle,” she said. She is always dressed to the nines, and sometimes poses in front of a luxury car.
Still, there are things that a can-do attitude and a hefty marketing budget simply can’t change.
Another of McCormick’s listings is for a penthouse in the former Montgomery Ward office building, a three-bedroom, six-bath condo owned by Arthur Slaven, managing partner at Centrum Realty & Development — first listed at $12 million.
A social media video of the condo got 1.2 million views. But the home’s asking price has been cut by more than a third and it’s still for sale, now at $7.95 million.
In a May interview, McCormick maintained that $12 million is the true value of the home but said that “market feedback was that we were just priced a little high.”
“As I move through the process with [sellers], I do have good intuition of what’s happening, and I like to be honest with them as well because I’m a fiduciary for them at the end of the day, right?” McCormick said in a later interview. “I have to be honest with them and say, ‘Listen, this is where we’re at with the market. … If you, Mr. or Mrs. Seller, want to sell this home, this is what we need to do.’”
If Slaven’s condo had sold at $12 million, it would have set the record for priciest condo sale in River North.
“Everyone has a picture of what their home’s worth, even real estate professionals like [McCormick] or myself. We can also suffer from thinking, ‘Well, my home is different,’” Golden said. “But in the end, the market is the market.”
Early career in development
McCormick got her start in real estate in the late ’90s when she took a break from her sales job at E*Trade, feeling frustrated and needing a walk, and stumbled onto a construction site — an origin story she has shared in the press before.
She proceeded to tell the sales manager at the site that no one would want to live in a residential building in the West Loop of that time period, a “pretty desolate” place past Halsted in GreekTown. “Now, obviously, I’m completely wrong in my opinion,” she said.
“He says, ‘Are you in real estate?’ And my first response was, ‘Yes, I am!’ Because I’m confident in what I’m saying and I’m young and I’ve got an ego on me,” McCormick recalled with a laugh.
The man asked her to come in for a meeting the following week, “so I literally just remember racing back to my office, and I jumped on my computer, and I’m typing, how do I get my real estate license?” she said.
In the meeting, she confessed to the man that she didn’t have her license yet, but he didn’t care. He hired her to lead sales at the building. She quit her job and never looked back.
McCormick went on to work in development for the first decade of her career in real estate, first with Rezmar Development, then Centrum Properties and then MCZ Development. She became a jack of all trades as she worked under interior designers, architects and general contractors. Her projects were varied: large, small, new construction and rehabs of distressed properties for resale.
McCormick met Golden and @properties co-founder Thad Wong when she was representing MCZ Development in selling a different West Loop project, a newly constructed loft, Golden recalled. She joined the brokerage in 2011.
This kind of knowledge of site and unit design, layout and finishes “translates well into the market today where positioning your home is very important” as many buyers are looking for turn-key homes, Golden said.
McCormick’s rise
to the top
On a side table in McCormick’s office lies a gavel from @properties Christie’s International Real Estate. Above it hangs a brass bell with a thick, knotted rope for ringing when deals close.
She used to ring it after every closing, McCormick said. But lately, they’ve had to stop. The deals are plentiful and the rest of the office needs to focus.
The space has no windows, something the top broker said she doesn’t mind too much. It’s a home base for her, evidenced by some clutter here and there, but her real work takes place out in the world — at showings or meetings with clients and potential business partners.
She always answers the phone. “If you call Carrie, you get Carrie,” one of McCormick’s past clients recalled being told. To his surprise, it was her voice on the other end of the line every time during the months they spent working on his purchase of a St. Regis penthouse.
The penthouse’s owners had bought the condo for $8.2 million in 2021, but they put the property on the market for unknown reasons a month after they bought it for a list price of $10 million. McCormick represented these sellers, and she also worked unofficially with the buyer, who had found her via one of her viral videos while looking for a summer home in Chicago. The penthouse eventually went for $7 million, a loss for the sellers, and it took a great deal of finesse.
McCormick “got us to a price point that we were not even prepared to reach at the beginning, but also got the seller to come down to meet us halfway with them taking a nearly 40 percent cut and us going 100 percent above our budget,” said the buyer, who asked to remain anonymous. “It takes a very skillful agent to orchestrate the deal I got.”
This is the work, behind the glitzy social media posts, that has bred McCormick’s success, fellow broker Erin Mandel of
@properties Christie’s International Real Estate said.
“All these shows, like ‘Selling Sunset,’ ‘Selling L.A.,’ ‘Selling New York,’ they have glorified our career and fabricated this notion that we wake up and put on Louboutins and open a door and make half a million dollars, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Mandel said.
“In times of turbulence, the brokers who hold the line between integrity and work ethic and dedication are the ones who prevail, and she is just such a good example of that,” Mandel said.