Chicago Home Sales Plummet But Not Sales Prices (Yet)

by | Oct 27, 2022 | Chicagoland Real Estate Information

Recession fears and crazy-high interest rates curbed Chicago-area home sales, but sales prices remain strong due to continued lack of inventory.

Sales Prices Hold Steady

The median price of homes sold in the Chicago area in September was $305,000, up 5.2% from September.

In the city, the median sale price in September was $320,000, unchanged from a year earlier. That too is better than last month’s figure. In August, the city’s median price was down 5.4% from a year earlier. Home prices in the city have been essentially flat in the city in six months of 2022.
Prices have continued rising so far in October, according to weekly reports published on Mondays by Midwest Real Estate Data.

Nationwide, the median sale price in September was up 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a report released separately this morning by the National Association of Realtors.

residential home prices in chicago graph october 2022

Sales Volume Falls To Pre-Covid Norm

The volume of home sales dropped locally. The 9,213 homes sold in September in the nine-county Chicago area was down 22.5% from a year earlier, when the housing boom was at its height.

But it’s more sales than in September 2019, the last normal year before the pandemic boom, and is in line with the average September sales figure in the five years before the boom. From 2015 to 2019, September sales averaged 9,269. September 2022 sales were less than 1% below the five-year average.

In Chicago, 2,030 homes sold in September. That’s down 24.4% from the same time a year ago, but like the regionwide figure, is above September 2019’s home sales count. City sales were about 7.4% off the five-year average sales tally in September, 2,193.

graph of residential closed listings october 2022

Some Areas Have Huge Drops in Sales

There are areas where the drop in sales was more than double the region-wide drop.

Elk Grove Village’s 52% drop was the biggest decline in home sales in September, according to Crain’s research in today’s data. Elk Grove Village is one of four suburbs where home sales were cut in half from one September to the next. The others are Grayslake (sales down 51%); Highland Park (50%); and Romeoville (49%).

In the city, the report breaks out data separately for a neighborhood’s single-family home sales and its condo and townhouse sales. The biggest September drop in the city was in Lincoln Park’s condo and townhouse market, where sales were down 41%, from 151 sales in September 2021 to 89 last month. It was followed by Logan Square condos and townhouses (down 33%) and West Ridge condos and townhouses (down 32%).

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