An inside look at Chicago real estate
By Dream Town
Sales of existing single-family homes and condominiums in the city of Chicago jumped 49.7% this March from a year ago. According to data from the Illinois Association of Realtors, home sales across the state experienced double-digit improvement last month as compared to the previous March. The jump in market activity…
By Dream Town
Generation Y is the largest group of consumers since their parents’ generation (the Baby Boomers). As this wave of twenty-somethings comes of age, there is much interest in what type of housing they want and home builders are already rethinking designs to best suit their needs. An article in the…
By Dream Town
Midwest home sales went up 8% in February from the same month last year and Chicago showed the biggest gains for the region with a 33% jump in sales from the year before. It is the sixth straight month of improvement for Chicago and the eighth month in a row…
By Dream Town
At a presentation for the Chicago Association of Realtors last month, it was discussed that the pipeline of new construction condos in downtown Chicago is drying up and that by 2012 there will be no more large-scale residential projects breaking ground in the city center. A handful of condo buildings…
By Dream Town
It may be autumn, but October was sizzling hot in the housing market, with Chicago-area home sales jumping 33% from the same month last year. Just as exciting, in early November the government extended the popular first-time buyer’s tax credituntil spring of 2010. A very important CHANGE is that this…
By Dream Town
In our current temporary real estate downturn, afflicted by short sales and foreclosures, it is easy to conclude that real estate has ceased to be the #1 investment opportunity. Well, take off those dark glasses and consider the following: Over the last 30 years, the Chicago Home Price Index* has…
By Dream Town
Well, it looks like the long-awaited bottoming-out of home prices has come and gone! Standard and Poor’s/Case Shiller index of Chicago-land home prices for August rose for the fourth straight month, suggesting that our area housing market is definitely on the upswing. Local home prices rose 1.7% in August compared…
By Dream Town
I can’t tell you how many times I have uttered those very words in the past 3 months, 6 months, year, etc when discussing the real estate market and where it is heading. The fact of the matter is nobody can predict with certainty what’s going to happen, with the…
By Dream Town
Two of Chicago’s largest real estate brokerages combined forces yesterday – the latest example in a string of similar consolidations resulting from slow sales and falling revenues. According to reports by Crain’s Chicago Business, Prudential Preferred acquired Rubloff Residential on Tuesday to create Prudential Rubloff Properties. The union comes after…
By Dream Town
The $8,000 tax refund has been valuable to stimulating the housing market, at least we’ve seen it in the Chicago market. Buyers are coming out of the woodwork and they’re excited to reap the benefits of buying before the tax credit runs out on November 30. The question is: Once…
By Dream Town
For the first time in 2 years existing home sales in the Chicago area have shown a year-over-year improvement. Media outlets such as the Chicago Tribune tout the news as a possible – sign that the local housing market may have, from a sales volume standpoint, bottomed out. According to…
By Dream Town
The Case-Shiller real estate index has been churning out doom and gloom reports about the housing market for the past three years. That’s why the public is really perking up now that the index is saying home prices are on the way up. For the fifth straight month, pending home…