As I’ve mentioned before there has been a lot of buzz in the Chicago real estate industry over the last few months about a slowing market. However, I’ve been unable to see it in the data. Months of supply, market times, and sale/ list price ratios have not been showing any signs of softening. On Wednesday I’ll be posting my monthly Chicago real estate market update but I can already tell you that there is still not going to be any evidence of a slowdown.
The only other metric I can look at is whether or not there are more cancellations occurring now than last year at this time. The idea is that if sellers are getting discouraged they may be pulling their homes off the market, which would then keep those homes from screwing up those other metrics we look to for evidence of the health of the market.
Unfortunately, this requires some calculation since it’s not a measure that is readily available on a pre-packaged report. I’m going to lay it out here in a little detail so that I can reference it in the future if I ever need to repeat the calculation.
Last October there were 9,789 residential listings in the city of Chicago active at some point during the month. Out of those 2,336, or 23.9%, were cancelled during the month. This October 2,797 listings were cancelled out of 10,524, which is 26.6%. So, yes, a greater percentage of listings were cancelled last month but I don’t think it’s materially different than what we saw last year.
So, until I see data to the contrary, I’m not convinced that Chicago’s real estate market is slowing down at all.
#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, 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.