Real estate news & trends

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A song for Studs

Studs Terkel, as probably everyone in Chicago knows, would have turned 100 today. Back in 2007 YoChicago attended the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards ceremony. Afterwards, the staff and board of the Community Media Workshop joined Studs on stage for a sing-along. The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Walz on banjo, Eric Zorn on guitar, and Mary ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 16, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Chicago Real Estate Daily now in its sixth year

Day in and day out the best real estate reporting in Chicago can be found at Crain’s Chicago Real Estate Daily. If you want to understand what’s happening and what’s trending in Chicago real estate, you’ll want to check in frequently with Crain’s. We link most of the articles on that site from our Chicago ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 15, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

CoreLogic calls a bottom on housing prices

CoreLogic has just released its MarketPulse report for May (pdf), based on March 2012 data. The money quote: Nationally, the housing market is in the process of transitioning to more stability in sales and home prices. Inventory levels are reasonable again, and even tight in some markets. The share of REO sales is declining due ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 10, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

CoreLogic reports Chicago home prices down, national prices up

CoreLogic has released its March Home Price Index report which shows that nationally home prices, including distressed sales, declined on a year-over-year basis by 0.6 percent in March 2012 compared to March 2011. On a month-over-month basis, home prices, including distressed sales, increased by 0.6 percent in March 2012 compared to February 2012, the first ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 9, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Chicago apartment vacancy rate continues to fall

The Marcus & Millichap Second Quarter 2012 Local Apartment Report (pdf) for Chicago was just released, and the forecast is for continued tightening in the city apartment market. From the report: Vacancy and rents Minimal construction and a steady flow of new residents into rentals lowered the city vacancy rate 30 basis points in the ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 8, 2012

News & trendsFinance

Mortgage fraudsters – 200 down, 20,000 to go

Late last week the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois announced the indictment of seven individuals on mortgage fraud charges. According to a news release (pdf): The indictment alleges that most of the mortgages were obtained to finance the purchase of condominium units in a building located at 4725 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 7, 2012

News & trendsPeople

Celebrating twenty-five years of Chicago real estate

I founded YoChicago’s parent firm, now known as Data Based Ads, in May of 1987. The company’s initial business was publishing a bi-weekly real estate newspaper – The Real Estate Profile – which fairly quickly expanded to weekly publication and was rebranded as Apartments & Homes. Our first specialty publication was the Loft Living Guide, ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 4, 2012

News & trendsBuying

New Cook County property tax site will make waves, affect property values

The new Cook County Property Tax Portal has gone live, providing easy online access to a variety of property tax information through a single website. The site is the result of cooperation among the elected county officials who take part in the property tax system. The aspect of the site with the greatest impact is ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 3, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

A dramatic shift in Chicago market conditions in recent weeks

Chicago market conditions by neighborhood

Eight weeks ago there were only 6 neighborhoods on this map that would be considered balanced (4-6 months inventory) and the remainder were decidedly buyers’ markets with more than 7 months of inventory of residential real estate for sale. Today, 14 neighborhoods are balanced, and the buyers’ markets have dropped significantly in months’ supply from ...

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Posted by Jody Wise on May 3, 2012

News & trendsNeighborhoods

Reilly Reports a good read, Reilly ego notwithstanding

We have, on occasion, called attention to what we perceived as arrogant behavior on the part of 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly, and linked to one of his critics. We’ve also suggested that an egregiously haughty approach to development merits being described as Reillyesque. It’s only fair, therefore, that we take note of something that ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 2, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Burbs going bust – dissembling with infographics version

The infographic has been craftily designed to convey a misleading picture of the relative state of cities and suburbs: The age of “sprawl” is ending: people are leaving the suburbs and once again flocking to cities in search of a better way of life. Whether Suburbia can be saved or not, it’s worth taking a ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 30, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

RealtyTrac: Chicago leads the nation in loan defaults, REO properties

RealtyTrac just released its Q1 2012 Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report, and it doesn’t contain good news for the Chicago-Naperville-Joliet metro area real estate market. Chicago ranked only 17th among the Top 20 metro areas in the US in overall foreclosure activity, defined as the percentage of homes in foreclosure (1 of every 107), but led ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 26, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Quote of the day – more rentals in houses than apartment buildings

Most people probably read only the headline at the various sources, including a blog at The Wall Street Journal, that reported on a recent CoreLogic study (pdf). It’s a striking headline: “Study: Rentals in Houses Outnumber Those in Towers.” It’s also a very misleading headline, in that it describes all 1- to 4-unit buildings as ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 25, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Case-Shiller – Chicago home and condo prices down again in February

It’s the last Tuesday of the month, a/k/a Case-Shiller Tuesday, and the results are in for February home price trends. The seasonally-adjusted index for metro-area Chicago single-family homes dropped 0.73% from the previous month and dropped year-over-year by 6.84%. This places the current index just below price levels prevailing in January of 2001. The seasonally-adjusted ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 24, 2012

News & trendsPeople

Master architectural preservationist Bill Lavicka

William “Bill” Lavicka impressed, charmed and captivated many people during his life, including many in the media, Don DeBat among them. Don became friends with Bill in 1974 when he wrote a neighborhood story on the Jackson Boulevard Historic District. They made wine together in Bill’s basement since 1983. Don sent along this remembrance of ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 22, 2012

News & trendsPeople

Chicago will miss Bill Lavicka

The time I saw Bill Lavicka, it was at his 62nd birthday party at a renovated home he called “Celestial House,” and vocalist Sean Harris was singing Stardust in French. Yesterday brought the sad news that Bill, a lover of “the music of the years gone by” has become stardust and moved on to a ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 19, 2012

News & trendsArchitecture & design

A visit to the top of One World Trade Center

We don’t normally range as far afield as New York for our posts, but it’s hard to resist meeting the ironworkers at One World Trade Center in New York, as the building nears its symbolic height of 1,776 feet. The architects from SOM describe the steel-frame building as “the strongest skyscraper in the world.” A ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 18, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Chicagoland home sales volume up 22 percent in March

The following market update arrived via a news release from RE/MAX Northern Illinois: A RE/MAX analysis of March home sales activity in the metropolitan Chicago real estate market indicates that the marked increase in home sales activity seen in recent months is beginning to have a positive impact on home prices. According to RE/MAX, combined ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 17, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

Quote of the day – housing bubble increasingly likely to return

Megan McCardle, at The Atlantic, quotes Karl Smith, an economics professor: My baseline scenario for the U.S. included a rapid increase in the number of multifamily housing units and a general return to renting. However, a few factors are combining to make me think that an alternate scenario, one in which the single-family housing bubble ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 16, 2012

News & trendsMarket conditions

CoreLogic touts investment returns on single-family home rentals

CoreLogic has just released its April MarketPulse report (pdf), with a raft of statistical data from February and some analytical insights that are worth a close read. In the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville area 37.6% of sales were foreclosures or short sales in February. The House Price Index was down 1.7% month-over-month and 7.3% year-over-year. Almost one of ...

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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 11, 2012

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