We’ve just added a new feature on our Web site that allows the curious to browse through and drill down into Chicago’s and Dupage’s real estate listings and get quick snapshots of the local real estate market, instead of just searching for a particular property. There are two different paths you can take from our home page – either browse by neighborhood or browse by zip code. Each of these starting pages gives you an overview of the Chicago and Dupage real estate market – the number of listings by type of property for each of our featured neighborhoods or zip codes. We picked these featured neighborhoods and zip codes based upon our current clients’ interests. If you don’t find a neighborhood or zip code you are interested in let me know. However, you can drill down on a more comprehensive list of neighborhoods from our neighborhoods page, which also includes profiles, maps, and real estate market statistics.

From these starting points you can drill down by type of property and then by number of bedrooms and bathrooms. 3 clicks is all it takes to get you to a specific home for sale. For example, starting at our neighborhood page you can click on the Lakeview condo and townhome link – 1009 listings at the time of this post. This page breaks down the Lakeview condo market into the different combinations of bedrooms and bathrooms. For each combination we show you the number of listings, the average price, and the minimum and maximum prices.

From there you could click on the link for the 47 3 bedroom/ 3 bath condos, which produces a list of the 47 individual homes for sale along with basic information on each listing such as total number of rooms, parking, and square footage. Clicking on any of those links takes you to the listing sheet for that particular property with all the pertinent details, including photographs.

Oh yeah…and, unlike most real estate brokers, we don’t force you to register so you can remain anonymous.

• Addison (80% increase from a year ago)
• Bensenville (400%)
• Hinsdale (122%)
• Villa Park (80%)

In addition, there were dramatic increases in the numbers of homes under contract in October 2009 compared with a year earlier. Among the increases:

• Addison (225% increase from a year ago)
• Bensenville (229%)
• Downers Grove (74%)
• Glen Ellyn (244%) 

The Case Shiller Home Price Index came out today for the Chicago area and it shows that for the 5th month in a row home prices have risen. We are now up 8% from the trough in April. As you can see in the graph below we undershot the trendline and now appear to be returning to more normal valuations.

Of course, prices are still down 21.6% from the peak and down 10.6% from this time last year. However, this certainly adds additional credibility to the notion that home prices in the Chicago area have bottomed.

We track this and other area home statistics on our Chicago Housing Market Statistics page.

It’s that time of the month when all sorts of real estate statistics come out. Today the Illinois Association Of Realtors reported that home sales for the Chicago area rose by more than 33% over last year. In order to get an idea of how huge this really is check out the red line on the graph below.

Up until very recently 2009 was the 3rd year in a row of persistent sales declines. Of course, this improvement is largely the result of the first time home buyer’s tax credit pulling demand forward but I was actually surprised this morning when I did a quick check of new home sale contracts in the city of Chicago for the first 20 days of November and discovered that they are actually up about 50% from last year at this time. I would have thought that all the demand shifting would have been done by the end of October as people thought the door was closing at the end of November.

One other anecdotal piece of evidence: even our most skeptical clients are signing contracts! Something must be going on.

As always you can keep track of these and other statistics on our Chicago area real estate market statistics page, which we keep updated.

When we updated our Chicago real estate market statistics recently we noticed that the last 24 months of history for 2 – 3 bedroom condos (the sweet spot of the housing market in Chicago) had changed dramatically from the last time we updated these statistics.

The red marker on the graph marks the spot where the new market time data begins. After calling the data provider and launching a 2 day investigation we discovered that they had just fixed an error in the way that they determine the days on the market. The result is that the market times are now shown to be much worse than we had thought but they have also been exhibiting dramatic improvements throughout the course of 2009.

You can see a similar improvement in the Chicago housing inventory, though these statistics were not impacted by the change.

Condo market times are down and inventory levels are down since the beginning of the year. The number of condos on the market is down at the same time that the number of condos sold is up.

There are probably several factors at play here. Certainly the tax credit is helping sales volume and I believe that sellers who are not prepared to price their properties properly have given up on selling – for the time being at least. Many of them just can’t afford to sell at current market levels. Some argue that this represents a shadow inventory of housing that will come back to haunt us another day. However, while I think that may prevent real estate values from rising, I don’t think it’s going to further depress Chicago housing prices because these home owners have already demonstrated an unwillingness to sell at current prices.

As always you can find our housing market statistics for several Chicago neighborhoods at the links below:

• Edgewater
• Hyde Park
• Lakeview
• Lincoln Park
• Lincoln Square
• Logan Square
• Loop
• Near North Side
• Near South Side
• Near West Side
• North Center
• Rogers Park
• South Shore
• Uptown
• West Town