Chicago Home Prices Keep Defying Gravity

Chicago’s housing market is shrugging off a national cooldown, chalking up the strongest price gains among the country’s largest metros and widening the divide between the region and Sun Belt markets now slipping into reverse.

October brought the sharpest monthly jump of the year, further cementing Chicago as one of the nation’s outliers, Crain’s reported. According to Illinois Realtors, the median sales price in the nine-county metro area hit $369,000 in October, up 8.5 percent from a year earlier. In the city, the median reached $370,000, up 7.2 percent. Nationally, prices rose just 2.1 percent that month, making Chicago’s growth more than quadruple the pace of the U.S. overall.

The numbers reinforce a year-long stretch in which Chicago has consistently ranked near the top of major metro price charts. September data from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index showed Chicago leading all 20 tracked metros with a 5.45 percent annual price growth.

New York, long the only big-city competitor rising faster, slipped to 5.25 percent. Eleven of the 20 metros posted price declines, highlighting what S&P’s Nicholas Godec called an accelerating deceleration nationwide.

Many of the worst performers — Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas — are markets where pandemic-era run-ups are now unwinding, compounded in Florida by an insurance crisis dragging on values. Chicago’s slower, steadier appreciation during those frenzy years left it less exposed, and now it’s a relative safe harbor. Price growth is cooling slightly from earlier Case-Shiller reports, but still handily outpacing inflation.

Sales, meanwhile, remain muted but stable. The city logged 1,782 closings in October, down 2.2 percent year-over-year, while the metro posted a 2 percent increase to 7,690. Year-to-date sales are up marginally — 0.5 percent in the city and 1.3 percent metro-wide — putting the region on track to finish slightly better than 2024, which marked the slowest sales year since 2011.

Unlike the overstocked conditions in much of the country, Chicago’s inventory is still tight enough to keep prices rising but not so thin that buyers are boxed out. A Redfin analysis found local buyers outnumbered sellers by 2.7 percent in October, making Chicago one of just eight balanced markets among the nation’s 50 largest. The gap is much larger nationwide, with available properties outnumbering buyers by about 37 percent.

— Eric Weilbacher