New Suburban Home Sales Increase

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.