ELGIN, IL—Home sales in the seven-county metropolitan Chicago area reached an 11-year peak in 2017, with 116,081 properties changing hands, the most since 2006 but only 1.3% more than in 2016, RE/MAX reports.
The median sales price for the metro area in 2017 was $236,000, up 4.9% from the prior year and the highest annual median price since 2008 when the median was $242,000.
Inventory in the metro area has been depressed for a long time, and at the end of December was 25,012 units, a 2.6-month supply based on the average pace of sales in 2017, or 7.7% fewer units than at the end of 2016.
“Relatively low levels of inventory certainly weighed on the housing market, both nationally and in the Chicago area in 2017,” says Chris Calomino, spokesperson for the Elgin, IL-based RE/MAX Northern Illinois regional network. “Even so, the metro Chicago market generally performed nicely, with prices rising at a sustainable pace. The average market time for all homes sold in 2017 was just 80 days, eight days less than the prior year, indicating that competitively priced properties were snapped up quickly.”
He adds that “the inventory issue is most pronounced among single-family detached homes, where it was down 10.3% at the end of 2017, while the inventory of attached homes was lower by just 0.6%.”
Home sales in the final quarter of 2017 totaled 25,034 units in the metro area, up 0.5% over the same period in 2016, while in the entire second half of 2017 there were 57,589 units sold, down 1.4% compared to the last six months of 2016.
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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.
