Every year I like to take a look at how fast homes are selling in Chicago’s real estate market at a more detailed level. Yeah, my monthly updates (I’m posting one on Monday) look at the average market times and sometimes I look at the medians also. This year the medians are down pretty substantially from last year. However, there are limitations to that analysis – the main one being that it only looks at homes that actually sold.
That’s why I take a snapshot of homes listed for sale early in the year and analyze what happened to them over time. Normally, I would look at homes listed at the beginning of the season and publish this analysis in August. However, as you know, this year’s “season” got pushed back because of the pandemic. I had to make a call on when the season really began this year and determined that it started sometime in the first half of June. That’s when the recovery in contract activity was well underway.
I started with 2481 homes listed between June 2 – June 15 – a bit less than last year’s 2892 listed from February 25 – March 12. I then tracked their ultimate fates from their list dates until yesterday and plotted the results over time in the graph below.
Now, keep in mind that the number of listings that expire or get cancelled is overstated and the number of homes for sale is understated because realtors routinely cancel listings and then relist them to get new attention from buyers. So those are not real cancellations. Unfortunately, there is no way to compensate for this problem.
So here is my summary of the stats:
- A little more than 28% of the listings sell within the first two weeks, which is a little faster than last year when only 24.5% sold in that time frame.
- 5.2% of the listings got pulled from the market in those same two weeks – just a little bit more than last year.
- At the end of 30 days just under 39% have gone under contract and a little bit more than 15% have been pulled from the market. Last year it was 36% selling within 30 days. So the Chicago real estate market is only slightly faster than last year.
- Because I started looking at a later time period this analysis only looks out 156 days or a little over 5 months. At the end of that time period just under 51% of the homes have sold, compared to 52% last year, and 41% have been pulled from the market, compared to 42% last year.
So the market is really not that different than last year.
#ChicagoHomeSales #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.