Houses in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood. (Andrew A. Nelles/Chicago Tribune)
By Mary Ellen Podmolik | Buyers continued to enter the local housing market last month in search
of deals. They found them, particularly within the city of Chicago.
Sales of single-family homes and condominiums rose 41.5 percent in
Chicago in February. The median price for the month was $176,500, a 19.3
percent drop from February 2009, the Illinois Association of Realtors
said Monday.
For the Chicago area as a whole, the year-over-year median price fell 10.3 percent last month to $165,000. During the month, 4,134 homes were sold, a 32 percent gain from February 2009.
It was the eighth consecutive month of improved sales volume for the Chicago area, and the sixth consecutive month of improvement in the city.
Home prices would have to go up 40% to give the average home owner what their property value was back in 1/2009.
Buying a home is not a sure way to build equity
Buy a kyte house and live in the clouds with the seaguls and egrets
If you think you are getting a deal in Chicago, wait till the new assessed tax bill comes in….and wait till your car gets broken into because its parked on the street…and wait till you start racking up city of chicago parking tickets. If you can move out of the city…MOVE, leave the city to Daley and his southside constituents.
From the potential buyer side, it proves that when homes are more reasonably priced, they will sell no matter what.
Want a real deal? Wait three years.
The government is running out of money to artificially prop up housing prices. The banks are going to be putting all those foreclosures on the market. There is no army of new suckers ready to run in and pay inflated prices.
In three years, they’ll be out of silly tricks and you’ll have a real idea of exactly how big that legendary “shadow inventory” really is.
Realtors will put a positive spin on the toboggan race all the way down to Hades.
how many of these sales are short sales driving down market prices even farther?
In the long-run, it is a good thing that house prices are falling back to an historically average level. True, it’s very painful for those who have bought their houses in the last seven years or so. But it’s great news for the young. It means that an average working family is the United States will once again be able to afford to own their own home without falling impossibly into debt. It will eventually mean more stability for any still decent areas of the city and suburbs that remain: people in them won’t as quickly lose their neighborhoods to urban blight as they did during this recent housing bubble, when dishwashers and welfare mothers could get $300,000 mortgages with no questions asked.
Good news is, home sales are up, bad news is you’ll have to do a short sale to sell it.
Its called foreclosure, plain and simple things are not getting better don’t believe everything the media tells you..
To DamnStraight – You are so correct. Between the govt, the media and these bogus Realtors, they would try to get you to believe that they are running out of tea in China if they could sell it.
You can see the monthly sales stats back to 2006 graphed here: http://chicagohousingstats.com We’re back to 2008’s level, which is way above 2009 but quite a bit lower than 2006.
It is irresponsible for them to be reporting changes in median prices as if they were changes in prices. Not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. Median prices are very dependent upon the mix of homes sold. It’s like reporting changes in the median price of meat sold when more people start buying hamburger and fewer people buy filet.
Good post, thanks
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