A reader directs us to the Uptown page of the Chicago Housing Bubble website, which includes this gem: "[Wilson Yard] has become the biggest government blunder in the history of government blunders (well, not really, but it's still pretty big)."
We were interested to read the figures on Uptown condo sales figures, which seem to be holding their own. No gains, but small losses, unlike the double-digit figures reported in other parts of the country. Uptown single-family homes and 2-4 flats, on the other hand... not such good reading.
We'd be interested in knowing how Uptown's percentages stack up against other parts of the city.
I like chicagocondosonline.com you can compare 3 neighborhoods at a time.
ReplyDeleteLook at the market time for condos-thats the bigger deal. Almost 6 months to sell your place.
ReplyDeleteWe don't know when these sales took place either. We placed our condo well below the market price in September--no takers. No one is interested. It wouldn't even have mattered to knock it down another 30k.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the original price, knocking it down $30K could make all the difference in the world.
ReplyDeletethe Trib site (real esate/recent sdales) has a link to "recent sales" you can see when sales took place and for how much $. For intance you can look at sales for a specific time frame on a building, block, zip, city etc. It's not incredibly up to date (I think it takes a while to get info uploaded). It used to be even more detailed but now one has to pay for the info.
ReplyDeleteI like www.dreamtown.com
ReplyDeleteYou have to sign up for an account, but it's free. Then you can search sold homes by neighborhood and even by the address. It includes the date it was sold and you can sort by date.
You can also see the price it's sold for on the search results, then if you click on a property, you can see the price it was listed for. It's pretty handy.
quietlyconscious, the real estate market is strange sometimes. When we were selling in Lakeview many years ago, an identical unit to ours (same building/floorplan/etc) went on sale 20K less than ours.
ReplyDeleteThe other unit had better everything: Better kitchen appiances, better bathrooms, better curtains, better carpet on the stairs.
Ours sold in 3 days for 20K more, while theirs was on the market over 3 months.
Our Real Estate Agent thought at the time that their condo was underpriced. He was saying that when people look at listings, they pick a range. If your unit is under the range they pick, they'll never know it's there.
Remember, there are condos out there in Uptown that were being marketed in the mid to upper 300k that are now selling in the upper 200k range. So numbers like this can be misleading. Whereas the sale price may look stabilized, it is in face higher priced units going for considerable less than initially priced that are skewing the results..
ReplyDeleteUptown Superhero,
ReplyDeleteAre you sure about that? I'm skeptical, and doubt that there are many people accepting selling prices $75k-$90k below their original list. On a sub $400k apartment, that is a massive discount. I'd bet that what you have instead is houses sitting on the market for 6,8, even 12 months because the sellers won't budge. There are five for sale signs on my block and some have been there since early '08.
Hi QC, yes, I am confident in my assumption. I am on the board of a larger condo building in Uptown... and included in these numbers are a quite a number of foreclosures... which are in the public domain. So , for example, condos that were purchased for $340k here are being short sold for $220k. This is what is skewing the numbers... there is another condo building close to mine that opened last year, sold only about 20%, went into foreclosure. Now the bank is selling the remaining 80% at about a 30% discount... this is happening all over...
ReplyDeleteA condo is only worth what someone is willing to pay just like anything so don't take the stats/numbers as gospel.
ReplyDeleteA question for the real estate folks... how are conversions treated on these sites? Are they included? e.g. one buys a 6-flat for 500K and sells 6 condos for 200-300k each totalling 1.5MM; are renovation costs included in the base?
ReplyDeleteYou mean for tax purposes, right? If so the answer is yes.
ReplyDeleteActually no. I meant for the real estate sites. If they're included, how? I would assume there's no "previous" price for each condo which would mean that any selling price would be an incalculable increase. Does MLS just take the developers' word for it?
ReplyDeleteIn the words of the late great Miss Emily Latella... Never mind.
ReplyDeleteI had a little brain-fart.
Statistics are very accurate for a population yet wholly unreliable for individual prediction. It would be helpful to the geeks to see things like median, mean, etc.
Bradley, that was a brain "elephant."
ReplyDelete