Monday’s IAR release of October’s home sale numbers for the Chicago area confirmed a pattern that appeared to be emerging recently. That pattern is that home sales for what is known as the Chicago Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA) appear to be trending much higher than for just the city of Chicago.
So I decided to break the home sale data down for each of the 9 counties that comprise the Chicago PMSA to see where the growth has been. Since 2009 and 2010 were substantially scrogged up by that idiotic homebuyer tax credit I decided to compare the October 2011 home sale numbers to October 2008, which was a pretty bad time.
| County | 2008 | 2011 | % Change |
| Cook | 3173 | 3112 | -1.9% |
| Cook – Chicago | 1589 | 1357 | -14.6% |
| Cook – Not Chicago | 1584 | 1755 | 10.8% |
| DuPage | 617 | 674 | 9.2% |
| Will | 420 | 560 | 33.3% |
| Lake | 471 | 573 | 21.7% |
| Kane | 326 | 435 | 33.4% |
| McHenry | 232 | 252 | 8.6% |
| Kendall | 102 | 96 | -5.9% |
| DeKalb | 53 | 69 | 30.2% |
| Grundy | 35 | 36 | 2.9% |
| Total | 5429 | 5807 | 7.0% |
It’s fairly obvious that most of the counties have seen healthy home sale increases except for Cook and Kendall counties. However, the part of Cook County outside of Chicago has also seen a healthy increase in home sales. It’s the city that hasn’t done so well in the last 3 years – down 14.6%. And you know what? This result is consistent with what I found last month when I looked at where people have wanted to live during the last decade – and it’s not the densely populated urban areas. So that trend might be contributing to the lower home sales level in Chicago.