Drew Walker, a disc jockey on Chicago country music station US99 for the past 17 years, is now selling homes in his spare time.
Walker, who this summer returned to his longtime 9 a.m.-to-noon slot after hosting the station’s drive-time show for about a year, has joined the @properties office in Western Springs.
“I get off the air early in the day, and I have a lifelong passion for real estate,” Walker told Crain’s. Both jobs are “about getting people what they want,” he said, whether it’s the latest music or a new home.
Walker has been licensed in real estate and helping friends and family with their home purchases for a few years, but with the up-tempo housing market these days moving at the pace of Walker Hayes’s “Fancy Like,” he decided to go into the business.
“The radio part aside, the reason I hired him is that Drew is a numbers guy, an analytical guy, and that’s what I look for in brokers,” said Tricia Riberto, @properties vice president for brokerage in Hinsdale and Western Springs. Walker trained as a CPA and worked in construction accounting and commercial real estate accounting before he went into radio in 2003.
“People with a financial background tend to do well in real estate,” Riberto said. “You put Drew’s skills together with his fabulous personality you hear on the radio, and I think he’s going to do great.”
Known to his radio listeners and social media followers for his sincerity and his custom of wearing flip flops, Walker is also “a really good radio interviewer,” said Ryan Arnold, a disc jockey on WXRT whom Walker helped hunt for a home in 2018. WXRT and US99 are sister stations, both owned by Audacy and with studios on the same floor at Prudential Plaza.
“Asking questions and listening intently to the answers is a radio skill that works well for a real estate agent,” Arnold said. He declined to say where he bought a home or at what price.
Walker, who lives in the western suburbs with his wife, Jill, and their two children, said there’s another factor making this the right time for him to get into real estate. At the dawn of the pandemic, two rooms in their home were made over as separate school-at-home spaces for the kids. Now that their schools are reopening, he said, he will take over one of the rooms as his office.
In combining real estate with a radio job, Walker follows the path of Johnny Mars of WXRT, who became a Baird & Warner agent in 2014, and @properties agent Steve McEwen, who transitioned from a radio job as Steve Fisher into real estate a little over a decade ago.
He’s not the first to infuse Chicago-area real estate market with a country twang. Two summers ago, EXP agent Sean Cochran got more than half a million views of his video that rewrote a Garth Brooks song into a depiction of working in real estate.
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