On Thursday the Illinois Association of Realtors will announce June home sales for Illinois, the Chicago area, and the city of Chicago. I’m not going to be able to report on those numbers at that time so I thought I would just beat them to the punch. I can easily come up with a pretty good approximation of what they will report so here are my predictions, which will prove to be extremely accurate:
- The Chicago (9 county) area will show a 27.6% increase in home sales over last June
- The city of Chicago will show a 28.8% increase
Here is the long term trend chart for home sales in the Chicago area, with each June flagged in red for easy comparison. In addition, the chart includes a 12 month moving average to smooth out the seasonality effects.
As you can see this was the best June in 3 years but at the same time this is actually the smallest year over year percentage increase since October. Up until now sales have been boosted by the homebuyer tax credit but that ended on April 30. Immediately thereafter Chicago saw new contracts plummet. Contracts written prior to April 30 were probably still closing in June but I would imagine that we’ve pretty much run through those contracts by now. Therefore, July might be a huge disappointment, though there have been grumblings about how there is a backlog of contracts trying to close and July may prove to be another positive month. But my guess is that if July does show a year over year increase it will be even smaller than June.