At barely 9:30 on a chilly, cloudy Saturday morning in May, real estate broker Fran Prio is already working the telephone in her tiny gray cubicle at Rubloff Inc.
She is calling a client whose home she wants to show. ”There`s a lady coming in from New York who wants a Lincoln Park residence,” she says. ”I`d like to schedule an appointment for 1:30 Tuesday afternoon. I hope it`s not the baby`s nap time.”
Next, she returns the call of a woman who is nervous about selling her condominium and has asked to see the other unit for sale in her building to assess the competition.
”The other broker can`t find the time to show you the apartment,” Prio says cheerily. ”But I can describe it to you. It`s white, pure white, with wood floors and white plantation shutters in the back bedroom. There are pilasters to create a foyer, and crown moldings. The kitchen has a white ceramic floor and white countertops. Not granite. . . .
”There`s Williamsburg touches over the door. This man is very traditional and had come over from Cedar Street with lots of antiques-very elegant, smart and stylish. . . .
”I thought yours was gone. I thought the lady from Glencoe would buy it, but her husband is a `view man,` and he had a problem with the view. . . .
”Yes, well, when you have modern, people want traditional. And if it`s traditional, people want modern. I think (the other unit for sale in your building) will go quickly. It`s priced in the 3s ($300,000s), a tremendous buy, because he wants to get out of there fast. . . .
”It will be the year. You let me do the worrying. It shows beautifully, and we just have to find the right buyer.”
Prio replaces the receiver in its cradle. ”I have this great new listing on Lake Shore Drive,” she says, in a chatty tone. ”It`s big-6,000 square feet. But it`s $3 million. ”There are about this many people who might buy it.” She holds up three fingers.
A trim woman of a certain age with a smooth spill of blond hair and lively brown eyes, Prio is one of thousands of real estate salespeople and brokers in Chicago and its suburbs-44,000 in Cook County alone-who spend their days doing business with skittish buyers, avaricious sellers, bureaucratic mortgage bankers and contentious lawyers.
But the similarity ends there. Prio is a legend in Chicago real estate circles. She is consistently in the ranks of the city`s top producers in residential sales.
In 1984 she sold $10 million worth of property. In 1986 she sold more than $15 million worth of property. In 1988 she closed an extraordinary $23 million in sales, a feat very few residential brokers accomplish. In 1989 she sold more than $16.5 million worth of property. And so on.
On this particular Saturday, Prio has an appointment with some new clients. Empty nesters from the suburbs, the youngish couple, who have been renting a Gold Coast apartment for a while, found that they like city living and now are looking for a three-bedroom condominium. They met Prio at one of her open houses last year and apparently liked her.
Prio has scheduled nine showings for them on the Gold Coast, starting at 10 a.m. Her clients are late. Prio wonders if they have forgotten and calls their home, only to be greeted by an answering machine. Without missing a beat, she brandishes a list of phone numbers. ”Doorman numbers for all the buildings around here,” she says, ”I carry one in my purse too,” and briefly contemplates calling to see if they misunderstood and are waiting in the lobby of one of the showings.
The sky is threatening rain, and the schedule is nerve-frayingly tight. If Prio is tense or annoyed, it doesn`t show.
When the couple arrives, a smiling Prio presents them with a list of available properties in their general price range and some listing sheets.
”After today I`ll have a better feel for what you want and what you respond to,” she tells them. ”Are townhouses of interest? Yes? What we`re going to see today are apartments.”
Then she leads the way down the escalator in the One Magnificent Mile commercial building where Rubloff`s offices are located and out to Lake Shore Drive. ”Is it too cold?” she asks. ”Do you want me to drive? My car is right here.”
At the first showing, a duplex on Elm Street, Prio unlocks the door and bustles about, turning on all the lights. ”It`s a very gray day today,” she says. She holds back the heavy drapery on one of the living-room windows and urges them to check out the view. ”They have lots of furniture in here, but you can see how big the room is. Others might have a grouping in front of the fireplace instead. Here is the kitchen: very functional; the countertops are Corian. The refrigerator has an icemaker.”
Leading the way upstairs, she points out the ”big master suite with tons of closets,” the large bathroom, the skylights. The back bedroom, used as a den/library, is painted a deep terra cotta, making it seem small and womblike. ”Think about how it would look in here if it were white,” Prio says.
”The ceilings are very high. And the deck is out here. Very private, an extension of the apartment.”
On the way out, she mentions that the building is very quiet and that the other owners respect each other`s privacy, ”which is very important in a small building.” Outside, she launches enthusiastically into a brief history of Elm Street.
Prio is dressed casually in black slacks, black-and-white sweater and, most importantly, black Keds, the better to jaywalk, as she is wont to do, and navigate the narrow staircases in a string of duplex apartments in a concrete box of a building on Lake Shore Drive. In the first one, Prio`s own listing, she exhibits her trademark ability to put a positive spin on what some might regard as a liability-in this case, a staircase that bisects the apartment.
”The design of this duplex is great,” she says. ”The stairway separates the space and gives you almost a formal dining room.”
In the other units, the listing brokers are low-key while Prio concentrates on her clients. ”Feel free to open those cabinets,” she says.
”Kitchens are important.” In another, she comments that the unit ”flows very much like a home, and the two levels give you a sense of privacy.” When the third showing in the building is over, the listing broker says, ”My compliments to your energy level, Fran.”
The schedule continues with two more duplexes on Goethe Street and two quirky vintage apartments on North State Parkway, one of which Prio unabashedly describes as a ”dollhouse.” While walking to the appointments, Prio chatters about the various buildings and regales the couple with stories- about how one of her clients ”duplexed into the basement” in this graystone, about the man in one building who grows tomatoes on his terrace every summer and gives them away to his neighbors, about the party she once attended in the former Playboy mansion (before Hefner) because her ex-husband had gone to military school with one of the sons of the previous owners.
The last stop is a handsome vintage on Dearborn Street, where Prio and the couple end their session by sitting down in the living room to talk.
”Well, we`ve seen some interesting things today,” Prio says. ”I think I`ve tired you out enough. Think about what you`ve seen and talk it over. Then we can go out again. There`s more to see.”
By now it`s 1:30 p.m., and Prio, a habitue of Cafe Spiaggia, finally stops there for pesto chicken salad and a glass of red wine. But she can`t help noticing one of her clients sitting rather forlornly over a bowl of soup at the counter.
”Excuse me,” she says. ”I have to talk to her. She put in a bid on an apartment she fell in love with and didn`t get it. She`s heartbroken.” By the time Prio returns, her cappuccino has gone cold. On most Saturdays, the intrepid Prio also would work an afternoon shift of showings, but today there are only a few more phone calls to make, and then she`s off for a massage to ease a week`s worth of tension.
–
The work-obsessed Prio lives in a condominium in One Magnificent Mile, enabling her to get to her office quickly by elevator at any hour. She often works long days. It`s not unusual for her to meet a client for breakfast at 7:30 to discuss the real estate market or to show an apartment at 11 p.m. because a potential buyer wants to check out the night-time view.
Prio started her real estate career ”from scratch” about 12 years ago when her marriage of 27 years was breaking up. She had never held a paying job before, but a marriage counselor suggested that getting a job might ease Prio`s transition and give her a better sense of self-worth. Prio decided that real estate would be interesting, so she took classes, passed the licensing exam and went to work for American Invsco Realty at the beginning of January 1979 in the wake of the famous snowstorm that helped sweep Jane Byrne into the mayor`s office.
In training classes for new salespeople at American Invsco, Prio says she was the dunce of her group.
”They put you in the back room, and everyone was supposed to move up to the front as they get a listing,” she remembers. ”I was the last one in my group to get a listing. I thought, `Gosh, I will never be able to do this.` I told my family that I was going to give it six months and give it my all, or I would find something else.”
Prio`s first manager, John Kretchmar, now vice president of brokerage operations for The Habitat Co., recalls: ”Fran started like most salespeople- a bit confused, without a great deal of direction. I sensed she could learn the business, but you can`t really look at a person and predict she`ll do $16 million a year in sales.
”At one point I made her get up and write down some goals on the blackboard-`I`m going to sell five properties.` Doing that gives people something to shoot for, and soon she just started to pick up and go.”
Prio plunged into the work wholeheartedly. ”I worked very hard, seven days a week, very long hours,” she says. ”I wouldn`t go home until 10 or 11 o`clock at night. I did a lot of cold calling to people selling their homes without a broker, and it began to work. I suddenly got my first listing, and from that my first sale, and from that other things began to happen.”
Despite her remarkable success, she has never forgotten that early awful feeling of imminent failure.
”Sometimes you can get complacent,” she says. ”But you can`t rest on your laurels because there`s always someone else who`s going to come along. Younger, smarter, whatever. You feel a responsibility to your clients. You have to do the best that you can, a good job.
”I`ve seen people who can just crank out deals, but I`m not a dealmaker. I`m not just doing it for the deal. I choose to think about my relationships with clients. I have one client that I`ve just had my 10th transaction with, and they moved to Minneapolis for two years in between.”
Those clients were Michael Marsho, Midwest sales manager for Multimedia Entertainment, and his wife, Buffy. ”Fran found us when we were selling an apartment on our own,” Marsho says. ”She brought in a client, and we`ve worked with her ever since as both buyers and sellers. She refers to us as her annuity. She`s a great woman. I just adore her. She`s very concerned about her clients, and her attention to detail and follow-through is excellent. She`s very committed.
”When Buffy was in the hospital for nine weeks in 1988, Fran visited her every day.”
Prio says real estate has been ”an outlet for my being a wife and mother for so many years. I`m a very caretaking person, and I sort of hover over. . . . I`ve always said that my listings are my treasures, and I treat them like my kids.”
