Data on how Chicago area home prices have changed over time is very rarely available at any level of geographical detail – at least for those of us who can’t afford very expensive data subscriptions. That’s why when Crain’s runs a special report on How Well Has Your Zip Code Fared Since The Housing Bust I like to jump all over it.
Crains’ published this report last week based upon zip code level data from S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and they created an extremely nifty graphic that allows you to pull up a graph of home price trends for various zip codes. The only thing is that it doesn’t give you a very good sense of what happened geographically – like where exactly are all those zip codes and what’s the pattern. So I decided to map out the May values by zip code below.
The starting point for the time series was September 2006 which is when single family home prices in the Chicago area peaked. The May values represent the percentage change in home values from the peak through May of this year and I plotted those values in the zip code heat map below. The darkest orange color corresponds to a 46.3% decline in zip code 60617, which is South Chicago, while the darkest green corresponds to a 20.1% increase in zip code 60610, which is basically the Gold Coast, Old Town, and the northernmost portion of River North. Yellow is somewhere in between like zip code 60010, the big yellow blob up there near Barrington where home prices are still down 13.2%.
You will want to click on the map in the blog post to launch a larger image and you will even want to click on that resulting image in order to expand it much further.
Oddly there is no data (gray areas) for the most central zip codes in Chicago but it is clear that the areas surrounding the downtown area have done the best – especially areas to the north. And the worst performing areas are to the south and west. And my East Village neighborhood is part of zip code 60622, which is the 3rd highest performing zip code in the entire area!
I counted a total of 154 zip codes in their database and of those 135 are still negative – and it’s been 10 years since the top of the bubble. Another bubble my ass!
#ChicagoHomePrices
Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service discount real estate brokerage. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market, get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry, or you just think he’s the next Kurt Vonnegut 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.