I made a statement the other day regarding the outlook for Chicago home sales that I need to retract. When I initially posted that I was eyeballing contract activity and getting overly excited at the trend. However, when you look purely at what’s closing the outlook is not as optimistic.
In the graph below I project home sales for Chicago for the rest of 2011 based purely on what has closed so far in 2011 and the normal seasonal pattern of home sales.
I still need to go back and incorporate contract activity into my forecast but that will have to come another day when I have more time. In the meantime, based upon this very crude forecast it looks like the back half of 2011 is going to be pretty much the same as 2010. Of course, the front half is going to be a lot worse because the government is not trying to meddle in the housing market this year.