2015 shaping up to be a big year for new construction in Chicagoland

Residential construction spending in the Chicagoland area was up 74 percent year-over-year in May, and so far in 2015 is 38 percent ahead of where it was last year.

Those were the two big stats from the latest Dodge Data & Analytics report, a monthly look at residential construction activity in the nation’s largest metro areas.

Chicago Agent assembled a series of graphs on Dodge Data’s findings. Below is total residential construction spending in May:

Though trailing Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. in raw numbers, Chicagoland’s market was well ahead of the pack in one key metric, year-over-year growth, as the graph below indicates.

Although year-over-year construction statistics can be volatile (the previous yearly growth for Chicagoland, for instance, was 17 percent), the 74 percent jump in new construction activity was far ahead of the other metro areas we sampled.

Even when analyzing more reliable year-to-date numbers, Chicagoland’s construction market still had a distinct edge:

Year-to-date statistics smooth out the volatile year-over-year spikes, and at 38 percent, Chicagoland’s market is markedly ahead of where it was in 2014. And given that Chicagoland’s rental market has already moderated in recent quarters – and that 55.4 percent of Chicagoland’s new construction is multifamily housing – it will be interesting to see how 2015’s high level of construction impacts the market.