Chicago Real Estate Market Update: November Another Down Month

It looks like the Chicago real estate market turned in another disappointing month in November. Home sales were down 1.6% from last year. Of course, the Illinois Association of Realtors will see it even more negatively in about 2 weeks when they report a decline of 2.0%. However, I'm thinking that these estimates might be off a bit. When I look back to last November's data it looks to me like either they pulled the data later in the month or there were just fewer reporting lags - i.e. the benchmark was higher than normal.

Nevertheless, the effect I'm worried about here is small and at best November was flat to last year. It's still clear that home sales have lost a lot of their momentum in the past few months. You can see it in the long term sales history graph below where all the November points are flagged in red and the light blue line is a 12 month moving average. Note that this November was lower than both 2012 and 2013.

Of course, none of this is a surprise in light of the extremely low inventory levels out there. How can you have strong sales when the shelves are bare?

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