It’s a common refrain that the real estate markets pick up in the spring and summer, as the weather gets better and families prepare to move during summer vacation. Sure enough, in both of the last two years, sales of homes in Chicago were strongest in August.
But that is about the only thing you can consistently say about sales by month in the last two years. You might expect the effect of the school calendar to be more pronounced among single family homes than among condos, and that was indeed the case last year—but not in 2007. The first six months of 2008 are almost a mirror image of those in 2007: that is, in months when sales were increasing in ’07, they were falling in ’08.
The whole premise of “month on month” comparisons is that March of this year should be like March of last year—and any difference can be attributed to different market conditions this year than last. But the attached charts show that is not true at all. Any month on month findings could easily be due to odd quirks of the seasons. If you had done a month on month comparison in April 2008, you would have found that sales decreased by just 38 units over April 2007—a rounding error in a month with over 6,000 sales. (Hope you didn’t call the bottom last April!) However, if you had done the same calculation last March, it would have been a 33 percent drop. The figure for the year? About 21 percent.
Quarterly numbers are much less prone to variations of the calendar. The quarterly sales declines last year would have been 22 percent; 17 percent; 22 percent; and 23 percent—a much more realistic assessment of how the market did for the year.