Could Chicago’s strong luxury housing market be slowing down?
Sales prices for Chicagoland’s luxury housing market slipped behind the general marketplace this year, according to a new Redfin analysis of the nation’s luxury markets.
Redfin’s study analyzed the top 5 percent of listings, and according to its research, the average sale price for Chicagoland’s luxury market in 2015’s first quarter was $1.491 million, a 3.9 percent decline from 2014’s first quarter. By comparison, the remaining 95 percent of listings in Chicagoland saw their average sales price jump 11.8 percent to $265,000.
Despite that reduction in price, additional numbers from Redfin’s analysis offer a more positive portrait of Chicagoland’s luxury market. For the top 5 percent of Chicagoland listings, the average days on market in 2015’s first quarter was 61, one day less than the 62 days for the remaining 95 percent of listings; given that fact, the reduction in average sales price was likely due to less sales in the ultra-high priced market.
Luxury Real Estate in Chicagoland
One other interesting characteristic of Chicagoland’s luxury housing market is how much more expensive those upper-tier listings are than the remainder of the market.
According to Redfin, listings in the top 5 percent are 5.6 times pricier, which is among the largest disparities in the country – though admittedly, it’s far beyond the 11.6 of Miami Beach.
This graph shows the luxury sales price ratio for the nation’s largest metro areas:
