CHICAGO—After an anemic 2014, this spring new home sales in the region finally started to pick up, according to the Illinois Association of REALTORS®. And this more active market has given a boost to local new-home builders such as Northbrook-based Red Seal Homes. The company reports strong sales at its new Provenance development, a luxury master-planned community of 137 homes in the Northbrook area. Buyers have signed contracts on roughly two to three homes each week since sales began in March, according to the builder.

Across Chicago's suburbs, sales of new-construction homes were up nearly 5% in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the same period last year, according to a report from Tracy Cross and Associates, a Schaumburg, IL-based real estate consulting firm. Still, the recent uptick in suburban sales hasn't sparked enough new construction to balance housing supply and demand. “At present, only 79 individual establishments are building homes in the region's production sector which compares with 529 that were doing so in 2005 when the market was at its peak,” the Cross report shows.

“We're a medium-sized, privately-held firm,” Brian Hoffman, an executive with Red Seal Homes, tells GlobeSt.com, and the Provenance development is “enough for us to achieve the kind of sales we're looking for.” And currently, the big public firms don't see sufficient upside to launching major housing developments. “Land is very expensive and the market, while functional, is not robust. We're still in a time when many are cautious.” When the top five builders have 12 to 14 subdivisions underway, “then we'll know things are healthy.”