Six stories above the intersection at Clark and Halsted looms a billboard that reads, “The Secret to selling Real Estate is Chaz. ” A photo shows the smiling Chaz Walters wearing a tie and white shirt, his shoulder revealing a hint of suspender. A red box announces that he’s sold more than $67 million worth of houses and apartments.
“Call me cheesy if you want,” says Walters, “but I’m the person who will sell your unit.”
“If it means redoing this whole place,” he says, “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
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But he had larger ambitions. His father had developed town houses adjoining Villa Olivia, which gave his son a taste for real estate and big bucks. “On the floor there is a million dollars,” his father had told him. “Your job is to learn how to pick it up.”
One common tactic for the neophyte is cold calling, phoning up home owners at dinner to ask if they’re interested in listing their property. “You make five million calls, and I’d say 75 percent of the people hang up on you at the start,” says Walters. “You don’t get very far with the other 25 percent either.” Sending out postcards proved equally futile. “Every new person does that. You can’t bleed blood from a turnip.” He didn’t want to try to persuade owners of property that had languished on the market with other agents to give him a chance to make the sale because he knew it was stale property, and he didn’t have a network of acquaintances through family, church, and school. He was also young. “People don’t want to give a $400,000 house to a kid, and I was a kid.”
Between 1991 and 1993 the Stanmeyer office on Belmont where Walters works jumped from next-to-last place to the top in total sales among the franchise’s nine sales offices. Cheri Davis, then office manager, credits part of the rise to the dumping of several nonproducing agents “who sat around drinking coffee and whining about the poor market” and the hiring of harddriving replacements. But she says a key ingredient was Chaz, whose sales were rising 30 to 50 percent a year. “He was the core of the turnaround. To succeed in real estate today you need two qualities–business knowledge and a marketing plan. And Chaz has both going for him. He took my office, and in fact the industry around here, to a whole new level.”
He moves on to a first-floor duplex, where an assistant is about to host an open house for other brokers. Apparently few are expected to materialize. The tip-off is the food. When Walters has a particularly attractive property to showcase, he provides a full spread–Thai chicken salad, sandwiches, cookies, fruit. Today there’s pizza from a box.
