In the News

Here is a number that reframes how you should think about buying new in the northwest suburbs: across the twelve towns we track most closely, there are 100 new-construction homes on the market right now — and 70 of them are attached. Townhomes, duplexes, villas, rowhomes, whatever the sales trailer calls them. Only 30 are…

Every national article about home equity borrowing ends with the same shrug: “It depends on rates.” One of the pieces that surfaced this week even told readers to brace for the Fed to hike later this year, which is a decent reminder that generic personal-finance copy ages like milk. What almost none of them tell…

Realtor.com published its 2026 Hottest ZIP Codes list on August 10, and exactly one Illinois ZIP made it: 60187 — Wheaton, at No. 10. The Northeast and Midwest swept the whole top ten for the fourth straight year. The South and the West didn’t put up a single entry. If you live around here, that…

Thirty-six percent. That’s the share of a typical American family’s income now going to the mortgage on a median-priced existing home, according to the NAHB Cost of Housing Index released this month. Last quarter it was 32%. A four-point jump in ninety days is not a drift — it’s a lurch. And yet in Wheaton,…

A story went around this month claiming the median local move in America costs $145. If you are sitting in a four-bedroom in Bartlett looking at a basement full of Rubbermaid totes, a treadmill nobody has touched since 2019, and a piano somebody’s grandmother left you, that number is going to feel like a practical…

On August 14, Governor Pritzker signed a flood relief bill, stood in front of storm-wrecked houses in the south suburbs, and every headline in the state ran some version of “Illinois homeowners to get flood rebates.” If you own a house in Bartlett, Carol Stream, or Bloomingdale and you read that over coffee, you probably…

Here is a scene that plays out a dozen times a month across Bartlett, Carol Stream, and Streamwood: a buyer falls in love with a two-bedroom townhome, writes a clean offer, gets it accepted, and then the whole thing quietly dies three weeks later. Not over the inspection. Not over the appraisal. Over a PDF….

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…

The 30-year fixed sat at 6.77% this week, with the 15-year at 5.95%, according to Forbes Advisor’s running tally. Bankrate’s rate panel for the week of August 13–19 expects a modest drift lower, noting that inflation came in exactly on forecast — which gave the bond market nothing to react to in either direction —…

If you’ve been waiting for the housing market to do something dramatic this summer, I’ve got news that’s either reassuring or maddening depending on your temperament: it’s not. As of mid-August 2026, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate is sitting around 6.71%, barely a rounding error from where it’s been for weeks. The Federal Reserve held…