Jeff Baird is a real estate valuation consultant based in Chicago. He founded Lakeshore Analytics to bring comprehensive, understandable housing data and analysis to Chicago-area readers. The site features a blog with free market news and charts, summary data on 20 top neighborhoods, and quarterly data subscriptions.
Many neighborhoods have faced a rocky road during the course of this recession, but one of the most striking has been Humboldt Park. The West Side neighborhood has seen the median price of a single-family home sold drop by 71 percent — and stay there for almost two straight years.
Often this is due to a small number of sales bringing the market down, but it’s not so in Humboldt Park, where the number of sales is actually higher than before the recession. Last quarter, 218 single-family homes sold for a median of just $64,000.
The condo wave never really hit the neighborhood — just 138 condos sold at the peak in 2007 — but the median price of a condo sold in Q3 2010 ($127,500) is less than half the figure for just two quarters ago.
The markets with the most stability were the condo market in Lincoln Park (median prices have barely budged since the recession began) and single-family homes in Lakeview and Beverly. You can see interactive charts of 20 Chicago neighborhoods here.