For the first time in at least six years, Chicago’s home price growth stood decisively ahead of the national average, according to a respected national index.
This is a significant turn. Chicago prices were growing at half the national pace or less for most of the 3 1/2 years prior to the start of the COVID housing boom.
The region’s new, better-than-average status is partly the result of West Coast real estate markets turning negative and pulling down the national figure. Nevertheless, it’s clear evidence the Chicago-area housing market remained more resilient than those in many other big cities, if only because it didn’t fizz into bubble territory along with them during the housing boom of the early 2020s.
Chicago-area single-family home values were up 4.8% in January from a year earlier, according to data released this morning by the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices. That’s a full percentage point higher than the increase for homes nationwide, 3.8%.
The index for Chicago was also slightly ahead of the national figure in December: 5.9% here, 5.8% nationally.
The last time Chicago’s home prices were rising faster than the nation’s was sometime before November 2016, the earliest date for which Crain’s could unearth the data. For a four-year stretch that ended in mid-2022, Chicago was either the slowest or one of the three slowest-rising among the 20 major cities that Case-Shiller tracks.
In January 2020, just before the boom, Chicago-area home prices were up 0.6% from a year earlier, the index showed. Three years later, local home prices grew at eight times that rate.
Keep in mind that’s price growth on top of price growth: At this time last year, the index reported Chicago-area home prices were up 12.5%. The latest report of 4.8% growth shows prices have continued to climb above those old heights.
