It looks like the pandemic driven runup in home prices is finally slowing down across the country as evidenced by this morning’s release of the September Case Shiller home price indices from S&P Dow Jones CoreLogic. The nation’s single family home prices still rose an incredibly strong 19.5% over the last 12 months but that’s down from August’s 19.8%.
Alas, the Chicago area is still lagging the other 19 major metro areas tracked by these guys with a mere 11.8% increase over the last year. Yeah, it’s a pattern. Second to last place Minneapolis single family home prices rose 12.8%. And you don’t even want to know how much home prices rose in Phoenix but I’m going to tell you anyway: 33.1%. WTF! Can you even imagine? And I’ve been there in the summer. It’s like a desert.
Chicago area condo prices have also turned the corner and are now rising by only 3.1% over the last year. I’ve got both single family and condo annual price appreciation graphed below. As you can see single family appreciation has been running at the highest levels since late 1988 but it still leaves us in the dust of the rest of the country.
Once again Craig J. Lazzara, Managing Director at S&P DJI, suggested that prices are driven by pandemic induced changes in buying behavior but resists concluding that this is a permanent change without more data.
Case Shiller Chicago Area Home Price Index By Month
The graph below shows Chicago area home prices by month going back to 1987 along with a red trend line that I created for single family homes based on pre-bubble data. August was the first month when single family home prices first poked above the bubble high and Chicago was the last of the major metro areas tracked by S&P Dow Jones CoreLogic to do so. September prices rose 0.6% above August, leaving us 0.9% above the peak.
And August was also the first month that condos hit the bubble high – but did not go above it. Then in September prices pulled back 0.2% so that we are once again below the bubble high for condo prices.
Looking back on that whole bubble episode we should note that single family prices have bounced 65.5% above the lows of that ugly period while condo prices have bounced 65.2%. As for that trend line, it does look like single family home prices have closed a bit of the gap but prices are still 20.5% below that target.
#ChicagoHomePrices #CaseShiller #HomePrices
Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service real estate brokerage that offers home buyer rebates and discount commissions. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market or get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.