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Lakeshore Analytics
It’s not surprising that the neighborhoods with the highest incomes have weathered the housing downturn better than the ones with lower incomes. But Lincoln Park stands out even among the upper-income neighborhoods of Near North Side, Lake View, Lincoln Square and Near South Side. A visual inspection of price and volume charts by neighborhood shows ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 13, 2012
It’s been a wrenching few years to watch price and volume movements in many of Chicago’s neighborhoods. These metrics are prone to doing strange things even in ordinary times. I track 20 Chicago neighborhoods with the most sales volume on a quarterly basis. In some neighborhoods, this adds up to only a couple dozen sales ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 12, 2012
Several neighborhoods that had seen a steep decline in median selling prices in recent quarters saw an equally steep rise last quarter. The effect was present mostly in single-family homes. Three examples are Near South Side, Edgewater and Rogers Park. The median selling prices of Near South Side houses had fallen 44% between Q3 2011 ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 9, 2012
The third quarter of 2012 was a good one in the city’s condo market: sales volume increased by almost 12%, and median selling prices by almost 11% over the previous quarter. It was the second straight quarter in which both those measures increased by double digits. The median selling price of a condominium or townhome ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 5, 2012
The level of housing starts in the U.S. (data not available at the city or county level) has increased noticeably over the past 12 months, but building permit data from Chicago show the city is not keeping up. Starts for the entire U.S., which are logged when a builder begins construction, have averaged 727,000 per ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on August 29, 2012
One thing to watch in the Case-Shiller home price index is the tiered breakout. S&P assigns each pair in the paired-sale analysis to the top, middle, or bottom third of pairs, based on each home’s first selling price. A separate index is constructed based on high, middle, or lower-value homes. The low tier has had ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on August 28, 2012
The bad news first: the median selling price of a condominium in Rogers Park last quarter was $62,500. But the good news is that they are selling at all. 163 condominiums or townhomes closed between April and June 2012, less than a 20% decline from the market average in 2008. The corresponding figure for the ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on August 27, 2012
Today’s front-page Tribune article on housing prices in the region reports that sales volume has been rising in each of the last seven months, but “sellers, take note: Housing prices are headed in the wrong direction.” Are they? I’m not so sure. It’s true that they are heading down, but that’s not necessarily the wrong ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on February 23, 2012
In my most recent post, I wrote about how condominiums, all else equal, can fall in value farther than houses due to underwriting standards issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA. I gave a hypothetical example of how just two foreclosures in a 12-unit building could keep anyone from getting a traditional mortgage. ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on February 16, 2012
Earlier this week, I wrote about three neighborhoods — Rogers Park, Humboldt Park, and Irving Park — whose condominium markets have been pummeled in recent years. Unlike some other neighborhoods with steep declines in selling prices, these neighborhoods remain broadly safe places, where rental housing is still in demand. In Irving Park and Rogers Park, ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on February 15, 2012
Condominiums in Rogers Park, Humboldt Park and Irving Park — three neighborhoods that once had strong new development and high selling prices — are now selling for 25%, 27%, and 40% of their peak price levels in 2007 or 2008. As of last quarter, the median selling price of a condominium in Rogers Park was ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on February 14, 2012
Compiling market statistics in Chicago neighborhoods has usually meant looking at a lot of jagged (and mostly downward-pointing) lines over the last few years. But in two cases, the lines have been pretty straight. The neighborhoods of West Town and Lincoln Park have had very stable condominium prices. In Lincoln Park, the quarterly median selling ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on February 8, 2012
The last time I wrote for YoChicago, I highlighted several neighborhoods whose sellers were holding out for a higher price — in other words, neighborhoods where sales volume has fallen, but prices have remained fairly steady. The story has been the opposite for several Northwest side neighborhoods I track. In Albany Park, irving Park, and ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 22, 2011
Owners of condominiums and single family homes in one of Chicago’s priciest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park, have not, on average, settled for lower selling prices throughout the recent housing downturn. In contrast to some other neighborhoods that have seen rapid ups and (mostly) downs throughout the last few years, the median selling price of Lincoln Park ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on November 8, 2011
The three months ending September 30 were a boon to single family home sales in several key north side neighborhoods, including Edgewater (up 91% over last quarter / 102% over a year ago), Lincoln Square (up 84% / 93%); North Center (up 119% / 28%), Lakeview (up 68% / 38%), and Uptown (up 79% / ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on October 28, 2011
Although the Chicago-area economy has seen 8 months of increasing unemployment, the city’s housing market showed some signs of optimism in the third quarter of 2011. Data covering July, August, and September showed a spike in single-family home sales and the third straight quarter of condominium price and sales velocity increases. The third quarter is ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on October 24, 2011
The number of homes sold in Chicago increased slightly in the second quarter of 2011, but the pernicious influence of distressed sales has been dragging down the median price of a home sold to just $142,000, or about half the peak of $275,000 in Q3 2007. Condominium selling prices and sales volume both increased slightly ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on July 29, 2011
Earlier this week, I wrote that sales were down significantly across the city in the fourth quarter of 2010 — specifically, sales of houses were down 20% from last quarter and 22% from the same quarter in 2009. The story was similar for condos, as sales of these were down 29% from a quarter ago ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on February 10, 2011
Amid a torrent of negative stories on housing, it is worth pointing out that housing has a function other than as an investment: namely, as a contributor to quality of life. Fannie Mae, admittedly not an unbiased source, recently released a four-part survey on the attitudes of owning versus renting. Among the findings: 84% of ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on January 5, 2011
Even as the population of Cook County fell by 141,000 from 2000 to 2007, the number of housing units rose by 75,000. The simple law of supply and demand tells us that housing prices in the county had to have declined as a result. And they have: IAR, Case-Shiller, and my own calculations all show ...
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Posted by Jeff Baird on December 21, 2010
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