Chicago housing market feels the chill with 15% fewer sales

Home sales in and around Chicago are starting to drop back down closer to pre-pandemic levels.

Both asking prices and sales ended 2022 lower than they were in 2021, the Chicago Tribune reported. In Chicago, specifically, the median home price stayed at $335,000 in 2022, consistent with the previous year’s number, until December when prices dropped more than 8 percent compared to the same month in 2021, according to data provided by the trade association Illinois Realtors and cited by the newspaper.

It also found that the number of homes sold in Chicago last year was down 41.2 percent year-over-year in December and 15 percent for the year as a whole.

Real estate experts say the drop could be a sign of the market stabilizing or it could just be a normal fluctuation that comes around this time of year. The median price of homes sold throughout the Prairie State still rose 4 percent from 2021 to 2022.

“Although the housing market in Illinois has slowed since its peak in June, the decline is largely due to the usual seasonality in house prices and sales,” Daniel McMillen, head of the department of real estate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a statement. “Our forecasts indicate that house prices and the number of sales will increase as the housing market picks up during spring.”

With more homeowners choosing to keep their properties because of the lower mortgage rates, Zillow found the number of new listings in Chicago dropped 35 percent year-over-year in December.

The market for new homes is also slowly becoming less competitive than it has been in recent years. Zillow data showed the number of homes selling above asking dropped to 29 percent by the end of 2022 and the average home sat on the market for about 33 days, which is almost two weeks longer than the previous year.