Carrie McCormick is a luxury real estate broker with @properties Christie's International Real Estate in Chicago, a Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist and a member of the Christie's International Real Estate Masters Circle who has ranked in the top 1 percent of the Chicago Association of Realtors year after year across a career that began in 1999. She represents buyers and sellers of architecturally significant residences, penthouses, new construction and single-family homes across the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, River North, Streeterville, the West Loop, Lakeview, the North Shore and Chicago's western suburbs.
Her career started by accident. In 1999 Carrie was working a corporate job and walking through the West Loop when she passed a sales trailer sitting in the middle of a vacant lot. She went in to ask what was being built. The conversation with the sales manager ran long enough that he offered her a job on the spot. She signed up for her real estate licence that week, and within two weeks she was sitting in that trailer selling one of the first new-construction condominium buildings in the West Loop.
What she brought with her was a background in design and marketing and a degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and that has shaped how she has worked ever since. The first half of her career was spent alongside some of Chicago's most prominent residential developers, selling buildings as they went up in neighborhoods that were still being invented. That period taught her how buildings get priced before there is anything to compare them to, and it left her with a working knowledge of construction, floor plans and architecture that most agents acquire second-hand if at all.
Today her practice is deliberately boutique, built around a model she calls 100 percent Carrie. Every pricing strategy, negotiation, marketing decision, showing plan and contract is personally managed by her, supported by a small team that handles marketing and transaction coordination. Her clients are entrepreneurs, executives, professional athletes, developers and families, and the reason most of them arrive is that someone she worked with years ago sent them. Whether you are buying a first Chicago condominium or selling a home you have owned for thirty years, she would rather tell you what a property is actually worth than what you want to hear.