By Dennis Rodkin
May 12, 2025
Crain’s Chicago Business
Credit: Dream Town Real Estate
Most of the growth in sales was in attached housing, including townhouses and condos, such as this new 18-unit building on Ardmore Avenue in Edgewater.
Chicago-area homebuilders had strong sales in the first quarter, one of the two strongest openers to a year in the past decade.
Builders sold 1,568 newly built houses, condos and townhouses in the first three months of the year, according to a new report from Tracy Cross & Associates, a Schaumburg-based consultant to the homebuilding industry. Since 2015, there’s been no higher sales volume in the first part of the year other than 2022, when all homes, new and existing, were riding the COVID-era housing boom. In the first quarter of that year, builders sold 1,620 new units.
The figure for the first quarter of this year is up 10.4% from the same time a year ago, when Tracy Cross reported 1,420 sales. The increase is more than three times the increase in new home sales nationwide, which was 3.3%, according to reports from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing & Urban Development.
While the big gap between the local and national figures might appear to join recent data on home price growth and the sales of homes overall in showing the Chicago housing market to be stronger than the nation’s, Tracy Cross’ top executive doesn’t think so.
“I wish I could say it’s because of a stronger housing market,” said Erik Doersching, president and CEO of Tracy Cross, “but it’s really a supply-and-demand scenario. We’ve been seeing supply run at about half of demand, but then we saw an uptick in supply” in late 2024 that fueled sales in early 2025.
Uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariff program and the possibility it will lead the U.S. economy into a recession mostly popped up in April, so its impact, if any, would not be seen in first-quarter figures. Doersching said that because “it was short-lived, only a few weeks,” its impact on the second quarter might be small.
The number of Chicago-area developments selling new homes hit its lowest point in the 21st century last year, putting a limit on sales volume. The number has increased a little — going from 243 subdivisions last year to 246 this year. That and builders putting up more units in the developments they were already doing was enough “to meet more of the pent-up demand,” Doersching said.
For eight years in the early 2000s, builders had over 900 developments going, with 1,285 in the peak year of 2007. The reasons behind the present day’s low supply include job centers moving back into or toward the city after a decades-long pursuit of outer suburban office parks, flat or declining population in the region reducing the demand for homes, and a high level of regulation that dims builders’ interest in launching projects here.
Most of the increased growth in sales in the first three months of 2025 was in attached housing, or condos and townhouses. Sales of attached homes totaled 613 in the quarter, an increase of 31% from the same time in 2024.
It’s largely the result of builders taking infill land where attached housing is what works, Doersching said, and not necessarily a turn toward a less expensive housing type. Among the new developments in Chicago are a 13-unit building on Kostner Avenue in Avondale with prices in the mid-$400,000s, and another on Ardmore Avenue in Edgewater where the 18 total units start at $799,000. Together, these two properties sold a combined 12 condos. The Edgewater project is seen in the image at the top of this story.
The biggest-selling development of the quarter is Rivers Edge in Woodridge, a mostly built-out suburb located 28 miles west of the Loop, where a national development firm is building a combination of multi-unit buildings and two-unit side-by-side townhouses on a site next to Seven Bridges Golf Club. Prices at Rivers Edge start at about $439,000. Pulte sold 44 units in the first quarter, Tracy Cross reports.
“There’s very little new-build opportunity in the core western suburbs,” said Dave Vivoda, a Keller Williams Premiere agent based in Wheaton, when asked to explain the appeal of Rivers Edge (where he is not affiliated). “With the location, you get easy access to everything the western burbs have to offer, easy expressway access, and you can jump on the train to get to the city.” Metra’s BNSF station in Lisle is about 2.5 miles from the development.
These examples suggest “we would see a lot more sales if the supply was there,” Doersching said.
The Tracy Cross reports cover only developments of 10 units or more and thus do not capture sales of single-family homes built on single lots or in small numbers in the city or suburbs.