Page 1 - Crains High-end homes sold like crazy last year. The market's even hotter this year. 6.9.22

High-end homes sold like crazy last year. The

market's even hotter this year.

2022 isn't even half over, but already there have been more homes
in the Chicago area sold at $4 million or more than is typical for a

full year.

June 09, 2022

DENNIS RODKIN

This year isn’t even half over yet, but already more high-end homes have sold than is typical
for a full year, a sign that the pandemic housing boom has been especially strong among the
wealthy.

As of June 9, there have been 55 homes in the Chicago area sold for $4 million or more,
according to Crain’s tracking of the upper-end market. In the six years prior to 2021, an
average of 52 homes in that price range sold per year. In 2021, amid the pandemic era’s surge
in homebuying at all price points, the $4 million-and-up category leaped to a record 101 sales.

The demand for upper-end homes is largely coming from “people in the financial growth
phase of their life,” said Emily Sachs Wong, an @properties Christie’s International Realty
agent. She represented buyers who on June 6 paid $5.8 million for a six-bedroom house on
Burling Street in Lincoln Park. The house was on the market just 13 days before Sachs
Wong’s clients put it under contract at $5,000 more than the asking price.

While declining to give any details on these buyers, Sachs Wong said the buyer pool she has
witnessed in the high-end boom is people who “are proficient in their careers and making
money and they don’t have a lot to wait for. Spend it now to upgrade to their forever home.”

The $4 million benchmark is not an arbitrary one. In 2015 Crain's began tracking the top 50
sales of the year, and $4 million turned out to be the bottom of that group. It held true, more
or less, for six years, until 2021, when there were so many high-end sales that the bottom line
moved by nearly $1 million. The 50th-highest price that year was $4.95 million.

At this point in 2021, 48 of the year's 101 homes had sold. If the sales pace of the first part of
this year holds through December, the year will end with 124 sales. It is, of course, impossible
to say whether the pace will continue, particularly with signs flashing that a recession may be
coming.

Continued…