Remember on Tuesday when I posted on the November Case Shiller home price indices? At that time I mentioned that the Chicago area was one of the few metro areas that had not recovered back to the peak price levels of the housing bubble. So exactly how bad do we look? I got the graph below from John Wake of Real Estate Decoded. He plots all the Case Shiller index values for all 20 metro areas they follow. The snapshot I took starts in 2000, just before the housing bubble took off. It’s kinda busy but if you look all the way to the right edge of the graph, 3rd line from the bottom in blue…that’s Chicago. That means we had the 3rd lowest cumulative price appreciation over the last 2 decades! And in case you are interested, Detroit and Cleveland are the two lower than Chicago.
Also, if you follow the lines you’ll see that most of them are now above their peak value during the housing bubble. 4 metro areas have not yet surpassed their peak and Chicago is one of them.
The graph I’m showing below is a static snapshot but if you follow the link I included above you can get to John’s original interactive version which allows you to select different metro areas and roll over the lines to identify the metro area and see the data values. You can also adjust the time range on the graph to go further back if you want.
If you’re a Chicago area homeowner this is not good news. But if you are someone looking to relocate to the area or you’re saving up to buy a home this is great news. The Chicago area is widely recognized as having great housing affordability.
#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.