The Post Super Bowl Chicago Real Estate Thaw
Every year as the professional football season comes to a close and the Super Bowl Champion is crowned (congratulations New Orleans), Chicago real estate once again begins its annual thaw. Chicago home buyers begin to stir and think about the spring market and start poking around the web looking at what is available at current price points. Which brings us to the housing values question. What can you expect to get for a home in the geographical area you desire and what on earth is your current home worth? Do you want to know?
Mary Ellen Podmolik of the Chicago Tribune recently wrote about how buyers and sellers are finding more common ground these days. Or maybe just a common understanding of the reality of today’s housing market. Fifty-one percent of Illinois buyers in the past year were first-timers, about 29 years of age with about $64,000 in annual household income and 67% of home-buyers bought a $200,000 single family home according to the National Association of Realtors study of 2009.
Not surprisingly, sellers are still holding on to the idea of higher home values even as some all of the equity they had disappeared in the last 2 years. According to Midwest Real Estate Data LLC, last year in the Chicago area, 38 percent of all single-family homes, and 24 percent of all condos sold were either short sales or foreclosures. This trend continues to create tremendous downward pressure on home values and no doubt are effecting your current home or condo.
As Mary Umberger of the Chicago Tribune recently wrote, Baby Boomers are especially feeling the effects of depressed housing values. Umberger cites the Urban Land Institutes study of the how it ironically effects her and the Chicago real estate market. Many of that generation find themselves in huge homes ready to downsize while the realities of the market are keeping them put without taking a bath.
Now that values are seemingly stabilizing, it presents a great opportunity for those who still have a job without a big home to sell, to move up to a larger home or start anew in the first-time buyer market. Many sellers may choose wait it out until the values really take hold and begin to show some signs of life. Those who can’t wait can prepare for the realities of housing in 2010.
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Susanne Tauke | Feb 26, 2010 | Reply
The Super Bowl effect is a phenomenon I have watched for years. And, yes, it still works. In our Newport Cove development on the Chain O’ Lakes, we definitely have seen an upswing in activity. Just yesterday we closed on a lot – a contract signed only a few weeks ago.
Interest rates are low, prices are competitive and there is pent-up demand. Because of recent economic conditions, people have postponed new home purchases. It seems folks are getting “itchy” to move.
While many of your readers were probably not paying attention to housing in the early 1980s, I (alas!) was. Then, too, the economy was in the doldrums. No one was buying homes. But suddenly (and, as I recall, it seems as if it happened over a period of a few weekends), sales picked up and Americans started moving again.
The new homes market can change quickly. Those who act ahead of the trend often get the best deals. I like to quote the old Wall Street adage: Buy straw hats in the winter. It’s always frightening to buy when the market looks horrible and hard to sell when it seems as if it will keep going up forever, but successful investors – the Warren Buffets of the world – have always bought low and sold high. . .