Chicago home sales had been declining now for several years but the Coronavirus really tanked the market in May and June of 2020. The market returned to more normal levels starting in July and is now setting new records.
Chicago Home Contract Activity
The number of home purchase contracts also hit a record in November – a 14 year record, which is all the years that I have data for. Contract activity was up 13.1% over last year and 23.1% over 2019 levels, suggesting that we should continue to see sales records broken for at least another month or two.
Chicago home sale contract activity is still setting records
Pending Home Sales
The number of homes under contract and waiting to close did decline slightly from last year, losing 178 units but that’s still higher than 2 of the previous 3 years. This pipeline of contracts feeds future closings and the decline contributed to the increased closings in November, but only slightly.
After hitting historic lows the backlog of homes likely to close in the next 1 – 2 months rebounded during the pandemic but is now starting to retreat again
Distressed Home Sales
If you look at the graph below of the percentage of home sales that are distressed you’ll see that we’ve been skating along the bottom for a few months now. November set another record low of only 1.4%, down from 3.2% last year. The pandemic foreclosure moratorium has certainly been depressing this number and now that it’s lifted it will be interesting to see how high it rises.
Since the housing crisis the percentage of home sales that are distressed has steadily declined to almost negligible levels.
Chicago Home Inventory
Well, it’s amazing that we’ve had such high sales levels when inventory has been so depressed. Once again we set record lows for both attached and detached homes with only a 2.2 month supply of detached homes, down from 3.0 months last year. Attached home inventory really plummeted from a 7.4 month supply last year to only a 3.9 month supply this year. When the pandemic first hit condos really fell out of favor but they have made a huge resurgence since then as evidenced by my earlier discussion of what’s driving the sale numbers
After a big Coronavirus induced spike in April 2020 the inventory of homes for sale dropped back down. Both detached and attached inventory keep setting new record lows.
Chicago Home Sale Market Times
However, there has been a bit of a running mystery in the data. While detached homes have logically been selling much faster attached homes have actually been taking longer to sell. Detached homes that closed in November went under contract on average in only 46 days, down from 64 days last year and that makes sense since there are fewer homes on the market relative to sales. However, despite the decline in attached inventory it’s actually taking longer for those homes to sell – 80 days this year, up from 66 days last year. Go figure. And by the way…half the homes are selling in roughly half the average time!When the pandemic first hit Chicago market times rose but they finally recovered with detached homes at a record low.
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