Housing Bulletin

Housing Bulletin—The Biggest Drops

This is the third installment of our close analysis of the real-estate charts that appeared in Chicago’s October issue. This week we are looking at the neighborhoods and towns where price drops were the biggest in the 12-month period covered by our charts—July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2007. Over that time, as reported in the magazine, sale prices on homes fell in almost one-third of the chart’s 77 city neighborhoods and 204 suburbs. Factor in the places where increases were nearly flat (less than two percent) and that means more than half the region experienced moribund or declining real-estate prices.

As in the last two Housing Bulletins—which examined the neighborhoods and towns with the biggest drops in sales volume and the biggest increases in sales times—this week we are listing the biggest price drops in each of three categories: city detached (or single-family homes), city attached (townhouses and condos), and suburban homes. Although there are a couple of place with startling falls—prices dropped more than 30 percent in the city’s Lincoln Square (detached) and South Lawndale (attached) neighborhoods and in the suburbs Richmond and Kildeer—most of the declines in the region were pretty small. For single-family homes in the city and suburbs, the typical drop in price was less than three percent. For city condos and townhouses, the drops were more often above five percent—but there were fewer drops overall for this category. (In all categories, we have only included places that had ten or more sales.)

A word about our data, which was provided by the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois: Since June 30th—the cutoff date for our charts—several things have contributed to the downward push on real-estate prices, including summer price cuts by frustrated sellers, fallout from the subprime-lending problems, and signs of depressed consumer confidence. That means prices may have fallen even more since the end of June, both in places that already showed a decline and places where prices had risen on the charts. With that in mind, here are the towns and suburbs with the biggest drops in sales prices since last year’s chart. All numbers are percentages.

SUBURBS			CITY DETACHED			CITY ATTACHED
Richmond	37.0		Lincoln Square	32.1		South Lawndale	31.8
Kildeer	32.3		Lower West Side	13.3		McKinley Park	26.5
Hebron	26.0		McKinley Park	9.0		North Park	22.0
Wadsworth	16.6		O’Hare	6.9		Portage Park	12.1
Kenilworth	14.5		South Lawndale	6.8		Hermosa	8.9
Wauconda	10.8		Lakeview	5.1		Loop	8.4
Willow Springs	9.6		Englewood	3.9		Dunning	7.6
Harwood Heights	8.6		Archer Heights	3.7		Humboldt Park	6.7
Worth	8.4		Auburn Gresham	3.6		Forest Glen	4.4
Inverness	8.4		West Englewood	3.6		Jefferson Park	3.5

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