CHICAGO—One of the coldest Aprils in the region's recorded history did not stop the housing market from heating up a bit. Home sales in the seven-county metropolitan Chicago grew 3.2% over April 2017, according to a RE/MAX analysis, and that follows declines of -6.4% in the first quarter of this year and -8.7% in March alone. Low inventory remains a concern, but company officials say they see at least a little light at the end of that tunnel.
Home sales for the metro area totaled 10,404 units in April, up from 10,078 a year earlier, RE/MAX says. It was the highest level of April sales recorded since 2006. The median sales price gained 2.9% to $252,000, and the average time a home sold in April spent on the market before going under contract declined to 80 days from 90 in April 2017.
“While the number of homes for sale in the Chicago area continues to trail last year's total, the gap got smaller in April,” says Jeff LaGrange, vice president of the RE/MAX Northern Illinois Region. “The end-of-April inventory of homes for sale was 5.1% lower than the prior April, but that's better than the -8.8% difference we saw in March. We'd love to see that trend continue.”
LaGrange notes that this improvement occurred in the attached-home segment of the market where the listing inventory was up 3.3%. In contrast, the inventory of detached homes for sale was 8.2% lower than it had been 12 months earlier. However, LaGrange pointed out that even the detached inventory picture is something of an improvement over first-quarter results, where the year-over-year decline was 11.9%.
MRED, the regional multiple listing service, collected the sales data used by RE/MAX. It covers detached and attached homes in the counties of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will. Detached homes are typically stand-alone single-family dwellings. Attached homes include condominium and cooperative apartments along with townhouses.
Total April home sales were up in all seven counties, as well as in Chicago. Sales rose 3.2% in Cook, 5.1% in DuPage, 6% in Kane, 1.3% in Kendall, 0.8% in Lake, 4.6% in McHenry and 0.8% in Will. Chicago sales gained 2.1%. Median prices were also up across the board, ranging from 2.6% in Cook to 6.9% in Kendall.
Sales of distressed homes, which consist of foreclosures and short sales, have dwindled drastically in the last few years. There were 815 distressed sales in April, -21.6% fewer than a year earlier and equaling 7.8% of all April sales. Four years earlier, distressed properties accounted for 32.8% of April sales in the metro area.
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
