This company was started on December 6, 1980, the day my first son, Bob Floss II, was born. On the way home from Hinsdale Hospital at 4:00 AM and saw a For Rent sent at 47^th and Gilbert in LaGrange. It was a 150 square foot room facing 47^th Street with a lot of exposure. Today sits a professional doctors office in that location. That was the beginning.

At that time I was working for another company as a Broker/Associate that had 6 offices and a commercial division. The owner had suddenly died of cancer of the lymph glands. The company was in chaos.

The general manager of that company came to me and said he was leaving because there was no way the company was going to make it.  Plans were not put in place for who would be the successor. The owner of that company was only in his mid-40’s when he died.

The general manager of that company gave me 4 desks, a secretarial desk, a used type writer, and a used copy machine. That put me in business.

I rejoined the LaGrange Board of Realtors as a Broker and my membership was withheld for 90 days.  I could not join the MLS system. Today this would have been a violation of Anti-Trust.

I began to go out and get listings without the MLS. I got these listings because I negotiated the brokerage fee. Then the realtors began to boycott my listings and made statements about my company, "you don’t want to list with him because we won’t show his listings."

I continued to do business and accumulated approximately 25 listings without the MLS. I was getting them sold by selling them by myself.

I got a call from one of the real estate giants in the area and he summoned me to his office. He was a retired Brigadier General in the National Guard. He told me to go back to Berwyn where I belonged. I had started in the real estate business in Berwyn. What the arrogant individual didn’t know is I had built my own house on Brainard in 1973 and had been living in the area for over 7 years. Today, my son and I still live in that house.

He then tried to convince me to do business the way it was supposed to be done in the LaGrange area. He would make arrangements for me to be accepted to the LaGrange Board of Realtors if I would agree to not take listings for any less then 7%. My statement to him was, I’ll do what I want, when I want. He told me that I was a maverick and I never will conform. However, I let him know that he was not as important as he thought he was and that if I didn’t get accepted to the LaGrange Board of Realtors within the next week I was going to the Department of Justice.

The meeting was over and I had got a call within 72 hours that I was now a member of the MLS and the LaGrange Board of Realtors. However, I did not conform, I still charged my clients a lesser brokerage fee then the norm.

I continued to do business throughout the 1980’s and my company grew. I expanded in 1980 and moved my office to 5504 South Brainard in Countryside. I left that location and moved to Western Springs in the Garden Market. It was a big mistake. I presently went back to my roots at 5504 South Brainard in Countryside and re-hung the signs they way they were in the beginning.