I don’t know what happened in the past seven days, but I only count 1,151 homes listed for rent in Chicago’s 14 big ZIP codes, compared with 1,628 listed last Friday. That’s not only a plunge of 29 percent in just one week, but it also puts the number of rental listings at its lowest point since we started keeping track last November. (It’s a good 11 percent lower than the previous low of 1,286, recorded on June 25th.)
Any number of factors could create this result — a run on units leading up to the start of school, or an error on the part of Coldwell Banker‘s search engine — but it’s a dramatic change from last week, when we recorded the highest number of homes listed for rent in the downtown market since March 5. Then again, if you map our our weekly findings in a graph, you’ll see that this week’s count is right in line with the general downward trend we’ve noticed for the past nine months, so maybe July’s high numbers are the outliers here.
(Now you see why we only report on this spreadsheet once every few weeks. We’ll keep an eye on the count through the rest of this month and report back in sometime in September.)