Home sales in the nine-county Chicagoland area rose strongly in November, according to new numbers from Illinois Realtors.

With 6,979 sales for the month, the Chicagoland market was up 16 percent from a year ago. Meanwhile, the median sales price was $215,000, a 10.3-percent increase over Nov. 2015.

Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, the director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois, said that pent-up demand may have been unleashed after the election.

“With the election finally over, consumers appeared to have responded with a significant growth in sales (year-over-year),” Hewings said. “Supply continues to be a problem, but prices of both regular and foreclosed properties increased, and the forecasts suggest that these trends will continue into the first quarter of 2017.”

And Hewing is right about supply – Chicagoland’s housing inventory was down 17.5 percent in November.

Housing in Chicagoland

Illinois Realtors also shared stats about specific housing markets, including:

• In the city of Chicago, home sales were up 13.2 percent year-over-year, while median price rose 11.3 percent to $260,000.
• Sales in Lake County were up 25.6 percent, and in Cook County, they were up 13.1 percent.
• In McHenry County, median price rose 12.5 percent to $193,812.

Matt Silver, the president of the Chicago Association of Realtors, attributed the sales increase to a number of factors.

“The sharp uptick in both single family and condo home sales reflects consumers’ desire to enter the homeownership marketplace as opportunities present themselves, with the anticipated rise in rates and declining inventory boosting activity,” he said.

Growth in the suburbs

Housing was also strong in Chicagoland’s suburbs, according to numbers from the Mainstreet Organization of Realtors (MORe).

Across the 200 communities in MORe’s region, there were 2,785 home sales in November, a 16.7 percent increase year-over-year. Additionally, pending sales were up 8.7 percent, and median sales price rose 5.6 percent to $229,500.

MORe noted that home sales were particularly strong in the following communities: Aurora (up 43 percent), Bartlett (43.5 percent), Carol Stream (54.6 percent), Lisle (72.7 percent), Orland Park (50 percent), Park Ridge (77.3 percent) and Wheaton (55.6 percent).