Park Place Tower Condos

There’s a lot of talk about perhaps the Chicago market picking up, But so far, there’s no sign of it. Now, I’m looking at actual closing numbers here in Chicago as reported by the Chicago Association of Realtors.

Week of March 7 – March 13th

103 Chicago Single family home closings - down 38% from the same week a year ago when 165 homes closed.

231 Condos and townhomes closed, down 23% from the same week in 2006.

I’ve been keeping close track of the closing numbers since last April and there have only been two weeks where the numbers weren’t down.

The average time homes are sitting on the market has increased from 84 days in March 2006 to an average of 131 days now.

Today there area about 15,175 active listings for homes for sale in Chicago…up from about 12,000 in March 2006.

There are 7,100 active condo and townhome listings for sale…up from just about 5,000 last year.

Looks like we have a pretty big supply-demand imbalance here. What do you think?

Prices haven’t tanked… but there are signs that sellers are going to have to start slashing prices to sell.

The Sunday papers are filled with Condo Developers and home builders offering incentives… “Six months free mortgage payments,” “free upgrades,” “plasma TV,” in an effort to spur sales.

The big news in the past couple of weeks has been the sub prime mortgage meltdown. In a nutshell, this means that a lot of potential buyers will now be squeezed out of the market. People who could have bought a home last year cannot today because of stricter mortgage financing terms. Some estimates are that this could knock 20% of the buyers out of the pool.

Now, Chicago is still booming. This is not a gloom and doom situation whatsoever, just as long as you’re not looking to buy a condo for investment purposes. Downtown Chicago luxury condos are being built as never before…later this week, probably Thursday, I’ll have my special report on pre construction Chicago condos ready…watch for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Market Update(t) , Luxury Condos(t) , Downtown(t) . You can leave a response.