By Dennis Rodkin
November 18, 2025
Crain’s Chicago Business
Credit: Lennar/HomeSmart Connect
A rendering of a four-bedroom house that Texas-based builder Lennar sold for a little under $410,000 in the Heritage Hill Estates subdivision in Maple Park, 60 miles from the Loop.
Ron Donavon, a real estate agent in the Fox Valley suburbs, had clients who were house hunting in the $420,000 range and wanted to be within easy reach of their workplaces in Batavia, so first he went with them to check out homes in St. Charles, North Aurora and Elburn, all 10 miles or less from their jobs.
The search moved west, and “the farther we went, the more affordable it got,” said Donavon, an agent with Keller Williams Inspire Geneva. The clients ultimately picked out a newly built home in Maple Park, about 19 miles west of Batavia in DeKalb County. They paid a little more than $414,000 in October for a three-bedroom house, about 1,890 square feet with a two-car garage.
Before buying, “they didn’t know much about Maple Park, but they drove around and liked it,” Donavon said, “and they could get so much more bang for their buck out there, so they did it.” (The rendering at the top of this image is another home in the same subdivision, Heritage Hill Estates, by the Texas-based builder Lennar.)
Donavon’s clients aren’t the only buyers who’ve revived the old practice known as “drive until you can afford a house,” more common in the subdivision-building boom of the late 20th and early 21st century than it has been in recent decades. Today’s affordability crunch is bringing the notion back, fueled in part by builders offering new homes at prices that make the longer drive worth it.
The metro area’s “leading homebuilders have definitely been pushing to outlying areas with value-priced product,” said Erik Doersching, president and CEO of Tracy Cross & Associates, a homebuilding consultancy based in Schaumburg.
The two biggest builders here, Florida-based Lennar and Texas-based D.R. Horton, both have higher-priced developments closer to the inner rings of the metro area, he said, but have “balanced that with more aggressively priced product farther out from the employment core, and they’ve benefitted from it.”
Factors include the relatively permissive building climate in outlying suburbs compared to older, more built-out places.
But the biggest driver is fast-rising prices for existing homes, which erases their preferred-pricing status for first-time buyers. “For the first time in modern housing market history, U.S. single-family new construction, in aggregate, is no longer selling at a premium to existing homes,” ResiClub’s Lance Lambert reported Nov. 13.
Nationwide, the median sale price of new single-family homes in August was 0.2% below the median for existing homes, an all-time low, according to Lambert. “That’s a dramatic shift from January 2013,” he wrote, “when the typical new home sold for 38.4% more than a comparable existing home, marking the highest premium ever recorded.”
The supply of existing homes on the market is epochally low, which leads to higher sale prices. Builders can’t respond overnight with new supply because they need to acquire land, get municipal approvals and install utilities and roads. But some builders spotted the shift early and are on the case.
Lennar, whose 1,037 Chicago-area home sales in the first nine months of the year amount to 24.9% of the new homes sold, had 116 of them in DeKalb County, by Cross’s tally. (One of those sales was to Donavon’s clients.)
Construction of new homes in DeKalb County, 54 miles west of the Loop, “was dormant for over 10 years,” Doersching said, “but now it’s picked up.”
Lennar’s media representatives declined to make anyone available for comment.
D.R. Horton is the second-biggest seller with 979 homes sold during the first three quarters, or 23.5% of the 4,168 new homes sold in the metro area between January and September. About 95 of those sales were in the outer-ring suburbs Pingree Grove and Hampshire, 50 and 55 miles from the Loop, respectively.
Single-family homes at D.R. Horton’s Cambridge Lakes North development are advertised with prices from about $370,000 to $452,000. According to Cross’s market tracking, about 48 have sold this year. At the developer’s Prairie Ridge development in Hampshire, advertised prices are about $350,000 to $480,000. There, 46 houses have sold.
Horton’s “goal is to offer attainable housing options for as many homebuyers as possible throughout the greater Chicagoland area,” Cole Tyrell, the builder’s north region vice president, wrote in an emailed statement, “and our average sales price remains well below many of our competitors. With limited resale supply, we’ve continued to see solid demand in emerging submarkets, where land and utility availability allow for larger-scale communities.”
Doersching emphasizes that builders haven’t gone all-out on building lower-priced homes far from the core, only that those firms that have added that line to their offerings have found success with it. Some of the best-selling subdivisions in the region, he said, “are value-oriented developments.” He’s seeing it in Beecher, Manhattan, Crystal Lake, Zion and other outlying points on the map.
The practice of driving until you can afford to buy a house “is definitely happening,” Donavon said, “particularly with first-time buyers, where affordability is of course a bigger factor.”