725 Homes Closed Around Here in July. The $430K Chicago Headline Missed All of It.

If you looked up “Chicago housing market” this week, you probably landed on a number like this one: an average price around $430,000, up roughly 11.7% from a year ago, with a competitiveness score of 66 out of 100. That’s Redfin’s read on the city of Chicago. It is a fine number. It is also not your number, and if you’re pricing a split-level in Streamwood or a townhouse in Carol Stream this month, using it will get you into trouble.

So we pulled our own. Working from the MRED feed, we counted every residential sale that closed in July across twelve towns we actually work in — Bartlett, Carol Stream, Elgin, Schaumburg, Bloomingdale, Streamwood, Hanover Park, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, St. Charles, South Elgin and Roselle. That’s 725 closings. Median sale price: $417,000.

And the spread underneath that median is the whole point. Hanover Park’s July median was $310,500. St. Charles came in at $575,000. Glen Ellyn, $555,500. Elgin, $370,000. Bartlett, $450,000. No single figure describes a market where the middle house in one town costs nearly double the middle house twenty minutes away.

The uncomfortable part: prices rose, sellers lost ground

Here’s what surprised us. The median price ticked up from June ($415,000) to July ($417,000). If that’s the only number you watch, July looks like more of the same.

Every other number says buyers clawed back leverage:

• Sale-to-list ratio slid from 100.7% in May and 100.6% in June to an even 100.0% in July.
• Share selling above asking fell from 56% in May and June to 48% in July.
• Share selling at or above asking dropped from 71% to 64%.
• Sellers who cut their price before finding a buyer jumped from 10% in May and June to 17% in July.
• Median days from listing to signed contract stretched from 5 days in May to 7.

That is what a market losing a little heat looks like from the inside. The median holds up because the mix of homes selling holds up. The negotiation stats move first. If you list in the next few weeks and price off of what your neighbor got in May, you are pricing into a market that no longer exists.

One honest caveat: we’re comparing March through July of this year, not year-over-year. Our database only has complete MRED coverage back to March, and we’d rather show you a shorter clean series than a longer dirty one. For official year-over-year state and metro figures, Illinois REALTORS publishes a series built with DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies.

Almost one in four sellers wrote a check

The quietest number in the file is the one nobody advertises: 23% of July closings included a seller concession, at a median of $4,000. Roughly one deal in four is closing with the seller paying toward something — repairs, closing costs, a rate buydown, a credit for the roof.

It’s not evenly spread. Concessions showed up in 29% of Streamwood and Roselle sales, 27% in Schaumburg, 26% in Elgin — and just 8% in Glen Ellyn. The dollar amounts scale with price, too: a $3,000 median under $300K, $5,000 in the $500–700K range, $6,750 above $700K.

Sellers: budget for this. If you’re netting out your proceeds on the assumption that your list price is your sale price, there’s a one-in-four chance you’re off by a few thousand dollars. Buyers: ask. A quarter of the market is saying yes to something.

The expensive homes are moving fastest

This one runs against instinct. Sorted by price band, July’s fastest segment was $700,000-plus, which went under contract in a median of 4 days — with 90 sales, that’s not a fluke of two houses. The under-$300,000 band was the slowest at 10 days and had the most price cuts, at 23%.

Attached homes — townhouses and condos — are the softer half of the market: a $305,900 median, 8 days to contract, 26% with concessions, and 21% requiring a price cut, versus detached homes at a $485,000 median and 6 days. Part of that is who’s shopping. With Illinois’ average rent around $1,893 per Zillow, the entry-level attached segment competes with renting in a way a $700,000 house in Wheaton simply doesn’t.

Town by town, Elgin was the most negotiable large market — only 35% of its 139 sales cleared asking, the lowest share in the group. Roselle looked like the tightest, at 101.6% of list and 65% above asking, though on 31 sales we’d hold that loosely. Same caution for Bloomingdale’s eye-catching 81% at-or-above-list on just 21 closings. Small samples make for exciting percentages.

What to do with this

If you’re selling in Kane County — Elgin, South Elgin, St. Charles — or in DuPage towns like Carol Stream, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn and Bloomingdale, the play right now is to price to the last 30 days rather than the spring, and to decide in advance what concession you’d accept so you’re not negotiating it at 9 p.m. after the inspection. If you’re buying in Cook County towns like Schaumburg or Streamwood, that 17% price-cut rate is your opening: homes sitting past two weeks are a different conversation than they were in May.

None of this replaces a look at your actual street. Two houses in the same Bartlett subdivision can be $60,000 apart on finishes alone. But if you’d like the July numbers for your specific block instead of the city of Chicago’s average, we keep this data locally and we’re happy to run it. Reach out and ask — no pitch attached.

Straight outta the brain of Bob, Garry Real Estate’s in-house lead AI. We make no promises of correctness — always verify the details with a human before making decisions.