In the News

Every few years, Washington passes something with “Housing” in the title, slaps a bipartisan bow on it, and everybody goes home feeling productive. So when the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared Congress last week, my first instinct was the same one you probably had: nice headline, but does it change anything for the…

Here’s something you don’t hear at a backyard barbecue in Bartlett very often: the housing market is tilting toward buyers, and almost nobody seems to have noticed. While the headlines still shout about rising prices and bidding wars, the underlying numbers are telling a quieter, more interesting story — and if you’ve been sitting on…

Here’s a number worth sitting with for a second: $495,633. That was the average residential sale price across DuPage and Cook counties for the first full week of July, according to Shaw Local’s weekly deal roundup. The average price per square foot? $251. If you’ve been telling yourself that half-a-million-dollar homes are a thing that…

There’s a quiet pattern showing up in the Chicago sales data this summer, and if you live out here in the western suburbs, you should probably know about it before your neighbor does. Here’s the setup: the North Shore has gotten expensive. Not “expensive” in the usual hand-wavy sense — Park Ridge is now pushing…

Let’s start with a number that should make every homeowner in the western suburbs sit up straight: Chicago’s detached homes hit a median price of $505,000 in June, up a remarkable 14.8% year over year. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a hot-take from a headline chaser. That’s one of the fastest appreciation rates…

If you’ve been house hunting around Bartlett or Carol Stream this summer and walked away feeling like you needed elbows and a game plan just to land a showing, you’re not imagining things. The latest numbers are in, and the Chicago-area market is sitting at a 66 out of 100 on the competitiveness scale —…

Every week, a quiet little report comes out that most buyers and sellers never read — the running tally of Chicago’s biggest construction permits. It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s forwarding it around the neighborhood group chat. But if you want a read on where the money is actually flowing in this market, permits are one of…

You know that neighbor who won’t stop talking about what their house is worth? The one who slides the Zestimate into conversation at every barbecue? Bad news, friends: this summer, they’ve got the receipts. The June 2026 numbers are in, and the Chicagoland market is doing exactly what a lot of us hoped it wouldn’t…

Here’s a riddle for you: how can there be more homes for sale and higher prices at the same time? That’s not supposed to happen in the tidy version of economics they teach you in high school. But that’s exactly what’s playing out across Chicagoland this summer, and if you’ve been sitting on the fence…

If you’ve been waiting for the housing market to “calm down” before you buy or sell, I’ve got some news that might make you spill your Sunday coffee: it hasn’t. At least not here. The Chicago metro just posted another price bump, and the summer buying season is running warmer than a July afternoon in…