Up until the Chicago real estate market update for June there were signs on the horizon of the market slowing down but closings were still looking pretty good. We knew it couldn’t last and, sure enough, the market cratered in July. Closings were down 25.9% from last year. Once again, that was the biggest drop in 2 years but, since the last 2 years were distorted by Covid culture, let’s compare it to 2019. July was down 8.6% from then and, as  you can see in the graph below, it was also the lowest sales level in 10 years.

In a couple of weeks the Illinois Association of Realtors will report that closings were down 27.6% because they insist on doing things differently than I do.

Chicago Home Contract Activity

For four months now contract activity has been signaling to us that sales were about to take a hit. If you’re writing fewer contracts you will be closing fewer sales. It’s that simple. The plunge in July contracts was even bigger than we had in June, falling 29.1% from last year which means we have more very slow sales months in store for us. Contracts are down on both condos/ townhomes and single family homes but clearly the condo/ townhome market is taking a bigger hit. However, read on because that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does.

Pending Chicago Home Sales

Future closings also look pretty grim because pending homes sales are also down, hitting a new record low since I’ve been tracking the data. They were down 1359 units from last year and 788 from last month. Both numbers are extremely large for this metric, which you can get a really good sense of from the graph below. In the simplest terms this means that the current sales pipeline is pretty thin.

Distressed Chicago Home Sales

For the first time in recent history the percentage of home sales that are distressed actually went up by a noticeable amount. 2.3% of July’s sales were distressed compared to 1.3% last year. But this is nothing more than a return to more normal distressed property sales after they were depressed by the pandemic foreclosure moratorium. As I’ve been reporting, there are no signs of a resurgence of foreclosures so I don’t expect these percentages to rise much higher.

Chicago Home Inventory

July marked a significant change in Chicago’s home inventory situation. For the first time in a few years the months of supply actually increased. Attached inventory rose from a 3.8 month supply last year to 3.9 months this year while detached inventory went up by a much larger amount – from 2.9 months to 3.5 months. Both of those numbers are still on the low side but it definitely demonstrates how the market has changed.

Chicago Home Sale Market Times

With all the data pointing to a slow down in the market I was surprised to see that homes are still selling…not just fast but faster. Attached homes that sold in July went under contract in only 48 days, down from 66 days last year, while detached homes sold in only 40 days, down slightly from 42 days last year. This may seem a bit inconsistent with the higher inventory levels but keep in mind that these went under contract when inventory was still lower than last year.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate

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.

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Homes are currently a better investment than the stock market. At least that’s the way it still looks based on this morning’s S&P Dow Jones CoreLogic release of the May Case Shiller home price indices for the nation, including the Chicago area. The nation’s home prices advanced 19.7% for the 12 month period. Although that’s down slightly from April’s 20.6% that’s still very high considering that mortgage rates were already on the way up during that 3 month period for which the data is averaged. Craig J. Lazzara, Managing Director at S&P DJI, is still saying that higher mortgage rates will surely kill the party at some point. Maybe he’s right but we’re not seeing it yet.

Home prices in the Chicago area were up 12.9% for the same period, which is about where it was the last two times the data was released. Again we are towards the bottom of the ranking of the 20 largest metro areas – third from the bottom this time. But at least we’ve had 13 consecutive months of double digit price increases.

Interestingly, condo price appreciation is actually accelerating after lagging single family home appreciation for about 3 years. Well, it’s still lagging but May was the 7th month in a row with higher year over year appreciation – 7.3%. That’s also the highest rate in almost 8 years. You can see what’s going on in the graph below.

Case Shiller Chicago Area Home Price Index By Month

The graph below shows the Chicago Case Shiller numbers for both single family homes and condos going back to 1987. You can clearly see how single family home prices really started to take off in late 2020 with condo prices just now taking off. Single family homes rose 1.8% in May from April while condo prices were up 1.7%.

I also added a red single family trend line based on the pre-bubble values that we had been falling further behind from until the recent price surge when that gap started to close. Currently we are 15.9% below that line.

Single family home prices have risen 79.5% from their bottom while condo prices have risen 73.1%. Both indices have finally surpassed their bubble peak with single family homes exceeding it by 9.4% and condos exceeding it by 4.6%

#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.

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Late last week ATTOM released their Midyear 2022 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report which basically shows that the pandemic did not have any sort of lasting effect on the foreclosure market. In the graph below the first half of this year is almost identical to the first half of 2020 and 2020 was depressed by the foreclosure moratorium.

Yet, Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at ATTOM, still seems to think that we’re going up a bit further from here: “While overall foreclosure activity is still running significantly below historic averages, the dramatic increase in foreclosure starts suggests that we may be back to normal levels by sometime in early 2023.”

I think he’s wrong. We’re already back to normal levels. First, he must be calling 2019 normal – probably because of the moratorium imposed during the first half of 2020. However, in all likelihood foreclosure activity would have been heading down even without the moratorium, given the historic trend. Also, the “dramatic” increase in foreclosure starts that he’s talking about is relative to 2021, which was extremely depressed by the moratorium. In fact, foreclosure starts were only up 19% from the first half of 2020 and, again, 2020 was artificially depressed.

Rick goes on to make the exact opposite argument:

It’s important to note that many of the foreclosure starts we’re seeing today – in fact, much of the overall foreclosure activity we’re seeing right now – is on loans that were either already in foreclosure or were more than 120 days delinquent prior to the pandemic. Many of these loans were protected by the government’s foreclosure moratorium, or they would have already been foreclosed on two years ago. There’s very little delinquency or default activity that’s truly new in the numbers we’re tracking.

OK…so now he’s saying that there’s not a lot of evidence of rising foreclosures – e.g. delinquencies. And that’s correct. Black Knight’s May 2022 Mortgage Monitor Report shows that new lows in the delinquency rates are being hit on a regular basis. The May rate was only 2.75%, just a tiny bit better than the April rate.

Once again Illinois had the highest foreclosure rate of any state and the Chicago metro area was among the top 5 nationwide. I have the monthly data for the city of Chicago plotted below going back to 2009 and broken down by foreclosure stage. You can see the steady decline over time and there are no signs that a resurgence is imminent. In fact, we are currently running below the level we were at pre-pandemic. And defaults are about at the same level that they were before the pandemic.

As a side note ATTOM’s foreclosure market report shows that the amount of time it takes to complete a foreclosure remains ridiculously high.

Chicago Shadow Inventory

The number of Chicago homes in foreclosure has been gradually rising for the last 12 months but very slowly as you can see in the graph below. Nothing really to get excited about so I don’t think this will impact the real estate market in a significant way.

#Foreclosures #ChicagoForeclosures #Coronavirus

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.

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I knew it was coming and it finally did. For a few months now Chicago home sales have been trending slightly downward but not dramatically. Sales remained at the top end of the historic range of the past 15 or so years. However, contract activity has been declining more significantly so it was inevitable that eventually closings would be hit harder than they had been.

So it’s no surprise that June closings were down 12.6% from last year. On the one hand that’s the biggest year over year decline in 2 years but on the other hand last June was an all time record for closings. So there. Also, if you look at the graph below you’ll see that we’re still running at the upper end of the range for the last 15 years and higher than both 2018 and 2019.

So it’s not the end of the world but it’s going to sound worse when the Illinois Association of Realtors reports the decline as 15.8% in about a week and a half. They just have a different way of doing math.

Chicago Home Contract Activity

Here is the contract activity problem I was just talking about. Each of the last 4 months has had a larger year over year decline than the prior month. For June the decline was 22.4% and if you look at the graph below you’ll see that it hit the lowest level of the last 10 years. However, what’s interesting is that most of this decline is attributable to far fewer contracts on attached homes – i.e. condos and townhomes. I’m going to guess that attached contracts are down 31% while detached contracts are down maybe 12%. I’ll get into the reason for this a bit later but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

Pending Chicago Home Sales

Until June sales have been subsidized by a backlog of homes under contract waiting to close – i.e. pending home sales. I think that subsidy has pretty much run its course as pending sales just hit the lowest level of the last 11 years, down 1378 units (that’s a lot) from last year and 561 units from May. Maybe this backlog can be drawn down a bit more but instead look for closings to track more closely with the declines in contracts going forward.

Distressed Chicago Home Sales

The percentage of home sales that are distressed is ever so slightly drifting up after trending down over the last 10 years or so. In June 1.7% of Chicago home sales were distressed, compared to 1.6% last year. When the foreclosure moratorium was in place it definitely depressed this number but now that the moratorium has been lifted it’s not like foreclosures have come roaring back. Basically they came back to where they were trending (downward) before the damn virus started to make its rounds.

Chicago Home Inventory

The inventory of homes for sale in Chicago may be a big part of the story as to why home sales are so low. Attached home inventory reached a new low for June with only a 3.1 month supply, down from 3.3 months last year. Detached inventory matched last year’s low of only 2.4 months. However, the months of supply number actually tends to mask the magnitude of the problem because I’ve got contracts in the denominator. So if an inventory shortage depresses contract activity then the months of supply number won’t look as bad. So I’ll put the situation in perspective. In absolute terms the number of attached homes on the market is down 27% from last year. That may very well be causing the decline in contracts.

Chicago Home Sale Market Times

When you look at how fast homes are selling in Chicago the market looks pretty strong actually. Market times are near record lows. On average attached homes went under contract in 54 days, down from 69 days last year, lending more credibility to the argument that the condo market is strong but there just isn’t enough for sale. Detached homes averaged 43 days on the market which is up only slightly from 40 days last year. And half of the homes are going under contract in about 2 weeks.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate

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.

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S&P Dow Jones CoreLogic released the April Case Shiller home price indices for the Chicago area and the nation and there is still no sign of higher mortgage rates slowing down home price appreciation. But in all fairness the April data is really an average of the three months ending in April so it’s a bit too soon to declare a non-event. 

The nation’s home prices advanced 20.4% over the prior 12 month period, which is only down slightly from the 20.6% number for March. The Chicago area continues to lag the rest of the country, coming in 2nd to last place among the 20 metro areas followed with 13.0% appreciation. That’s up just a tad from March’s 12.9% and it’s the 12th consecutive month with double digit year over year gains.

Condominium/ townhome price appreciation set another record for annual price appreciation over the last (almost) 8 years of 6.7%.

Craig J. Lazzara, Managing Director at S&P DJI, tried to make the case that the slight decline in home price appreciation from March was actually a sign of mortgage rate related slowing. But I did not find him persuasive. However, he did point out that this data does not yet reflect the highest mortgage rates we’ve seen recently:

We noted last month that mortgage financing has become more expensive as the Federal Reserve ratchets up interest rates, a process that had only just begun when April data were gathered. A more-challenging macroeconomic environment may not support extraordinary home price growth for much longer.

Case Shiller Chicago Area Home Price Index By Month

The graph below shows the actual Case Shiller Chicago area index values by month going back to 1987 along with a trend line that I developed based upon pre-bubble single family home prices. Single family home prices rose by 1.9% from March. Now there is a lot of seasonality in these numbers but, still, that just happens to be the largest one month change in 8 years. Condominium prices rose by 1.1% in that one month.

That trend line is really interesting because ever since the housing crash prices fell below the line and stayed there for about 10 years. Only since the pandemic have we started to close the gap, which is still 17.1%.

Single family home prices have risen 76.4% from the bottom of the housing crash and now surpass their previous peak by 7.5%. Condos and townhomes have jumped 70.2%, finally passing their peak by 2.9%.

#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.

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I’d say it’s been around 10 months since Chicago’s foreclosure activity started to make a comeback but so far it’s no worse than it was just before the pandemic hit. I’m looking at the ATTOM May Foreclosure Market Report released a couple of weeks ago.

At the national level foreclosure activity was only up 1% from the previous month and Illinois and Chicago continue to rank among the top states and metro areas, respectively, for foreclosures. But Rich Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at ATTOM, speculates that inflation may trigger higher foreclosure rates as people’s budgets get stretched too thin.

Looking at their Chicago data in the graph below we have yet to exceed the foreclosure activity level of January 2020.

If you want to get a sneak peak at where foreclosures might be headed look no further than delinquencies as reported by Black Knight. Their April mortgage data actually shows a continued decline in delinquencies – very slightly down from March’s record low to a mere 2.8%. So no signs of a threat there.

Chicago Shadow Inventory

For the 11th month in a row we’ve seen the number of Chicago homes at some stage of foreclosure rise. But, as you can see in the graph below, this “shadow inventory” remain at incredible historically low levels and is rising ever so slowly.

#Foreclosures #ChicagoForeclosures #Coronavirus

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.

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Unless you live under a rock (cheaper than buying a home) you’ve heard about how high mortgage rates have risen and you’ve heard the speculation that that might kill home prices. That last point is debatable for reasons I’ll go into later. So I was really curious what the Pulsenomics and Zillow Q2 2022 Home Price Expectations Survey of over 100 real estate experts was going to show for the future of home prices across the nation. That came out last week and, surprisingly, their outlook is not that much different than it was last quarter. See the orange line in the graph below.

In a nutshell they actually raised their 2022 forecast to 9.3% appreciation from 9.0% last quarter but over the entire 5 year period they knocked down their outlook just slightly – to 26.4% from 26.8%.

I thought Pulsenomics founder Terry Loebs seemed a bit surprised by this outcome:

Rapidly rising mortgage rates and looming recession risk threaten to tame the pandemic’s hurricane-force winds that have whipped the market landscape and propelled U.S. home prices skyward. With home values at record-high levels and a vast majority of experts projecting additional price increases this year and beyond, home prices and expectations remain buoyant. Even among those panelists who believe the U.S. housing market is now a bubble, most expect it to gradually deflate, not suddenly burst.

Clearly these folks don’t think higher mortgage rates are going to kill home prices, despite the fact that home builder and realtor stocks are crashing. How could that be? Well, it’s possible. You could definitely see more buyers and sellers stepping to the sidelines now, which would be bad for those stocks. However, if demand and supply both contract equally then you might not get any change in the trajectory of home prices.

However, there are a couple of underlying beliefs behind this outlook. First, only 32% of these experts think the housing market is in a bubble. That means that, in general, the group does not foresee any pressure for home prices to “normalize”. And, second, apparently these experts don’t expect mortgage rates to go that high. Their mean forecast for 2022 was only 5.6% (back when this survey was conducted) but we’ve already hit 6.3%. So how will they forecast home prices next time?

Chicago Area Home Price Outlook

Once again John Dolan, the market maker for the Case Shiller home price futures, has provided me with pricing for the Chicago area futures contracts so that we can get an idea of where the market thinks home prices are going in the metro area.

Unfortunately, right now there are only bid and ask pairs going out 2 years due to the tremendous uncertainty surrounding the housing market. But those futures prices imply a measly 0.7% per year appreciation rate. John Dolan points out that this is probably due to a lot of selling pressure in the contracts but, then again, that must mean that these sellers are not too optimistic about the outlook for Chicago area home prices.

You will note that there are asks plotted out beyond 2 years and they are showing some increase in the index values. However, we can’t read too much into that because there are no corresponding bids and it’s not like there is a lot of competition for selling those contracts.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #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.

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It’s still relatively early in this cycle of increasing mortgage rates but so far closings have not really been impacted. There’s a bit more to this story below but, in the meantime, check out this graph and remember that last May set a blow out record for home sales. So when I tell you that this May’s sales were down by 1.8% that’s actually really impressive. It was up 14.0% from 2019 and it was the second highest sales in 16 years. This is one of those times when coming in second is nothing to frown about.

As usual the Illinois Association of Realtors will report slightly weaker sales than me in two weeks. They will come in with a 4.5% decline.

Chicago Home Contract Activity

However, the rest of the story is in the contract activity, which is starting to show signs of weakness and it’s a leading indicator of sales, right? May was the third month in a row of fairly significant and increasing declines in contracts written. You can see it clearly in the moving average line in the graph below. May contracts were down 18.6% from last year and only up slightly from the 2019 level. You would think that eventually this would show up in lower sales figures.

Pending Chicago Home Sales

What’s been keeping the lower contract figures from translating into lower sales is a backlog of pending sales which has been drawing down for about a year now. You can see that in the graph below – check out the moving average line. May’s pending home sales were down 1455 units from the previous year and 328 units from April. That’s pretty significant when  you consider that May sales were 3291 units. But there are limits to how much more we can go to the “well” for additional sales.

Distressed Chicago Home Sales

I’ve been talking about how foreclosure activity has been fairly muted since the expiration of the foreclosure moratorium so it’s no surprise that the percentage of distressed sales remains pretty low. However, it has been ticking up slightly lately. May came in with only 2.2% distressed sales compared to an even lower 1.1% last year. You can see the trend in the graph below. But I don’t think the percentage is going to go much higher, given the low level of foreclosure activity.

Chicago Home Inventory

The strength of the market can be measured by the supply/ demand imbalance as summed up in the months of supply. Both detached and attached homes keep hitting new lows. Detached inventory was the same as last year with a 1.9 month supply while attached inventory fell to 2.3 months vs. 2.8 last year. Just glancing at the graph you can see how 5 months was a more typical number once we got past the housing crash and that is generally seen as a more balanced market.

Chicago Home Sale Market Times

How long it takes to sell a home is also a great indicator of the strength of a market and again we’re seeing some positive signs. Attached market times are fairly low at 59 days on average – down from 81 days last year – but, as you can see in the graph, that’s not a record. On the other hand detached market times of 46 days is a record low and that is down from 50 days last year.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate

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.

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