It’s that time of the month when all sorts of real estate statistics come out. Today the Illinois Association Of Realtors reported that home sales for the Chicago area rose by more than 33% over last year. In order to get an idea of how huge this really is check out the red line on the graph below.
Up until very recently 2009 was the 3rd year in a row of persistent sales declines. Of course, this improvement is largely the result of the first time home buyer’s tax credit pulling demand forward but I was actually surprised this morning when I did a quick check of new home sale contracts in the city of Chicago for the first 20 days of November and discovered that they are actually up about 50% from last year at this time. I would have thought that all the demand shifting would have been done by the end of October as people thought the door was closing at the end of November.
One other anecdotal piece of evidence: even our most skeptical clients are signing contracts! Something must be going on.
As always you can keep track of these and other statistics on our Chicago area real estate market statistics page, which we keep updated.