Blog
The Good, The Bad, The Local: The Housing Market's Rebound
As the United States limps out of economic disarray, it can often seem like the nation is taking one step forward and two back. This spring’s home-buying season is typical of that lurching sensation. Home prices are slowly climbing—by 4.6 percent since last year, according to Black Knight Financial Services. The latest report from...
Examining Patterns of Concentrated Institutional Investor Purchases in Cook County
After aggressively entering the housing market in 2012, institutional investors slowed their purchasing of single family homes in early 2014, signaling the beginning of a new phase in the real estate owned (REO)-to-rental cycle that shifts focus away from property acquisition and increasingly toward how these global corporations will act as property owners...
A Closer Look at Business Buyer Activity in Cook County in 2013
The growth of institutional investors as a dominant player in certain hard-hit housing markets may have implications for the recovery and stability of these markets in coming years. This post examines the recent activity of the top business buyers of single family homes in Cook County and highlights the emergence...
Informing the Housing Market Recovery
Where is the housing market headed? The U.S. housing market could be in a recovery that is showing signs of slowing. Or perhaps it is recovering too quickly and another bubble is forming which is on its way to bursting.The true nature and the direction of the housing market recovery...
On the Ground: A Tour of the Humboldt Park Micro Market Recovery Area
John Groene seems to have a story about every property in Humboldt Park—a wealth of knowledge about the owners and transaction histories of so many homes that it has been described as “encyclopedic.”Members of the IHS staff visited the Humboldt Park field office of Neighborhood Housing Service (NHS), where Groene...
Finding Affordable Housing in Chicago Lawn: One Renter's Story
One of the goals of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University is to work with the staff, faculty, and students at DePaul in order to foster cross-disciplinary learning about community development as it pertains to affordable housing and, in doing so, to further the missions of both the...
Understanding Vacancy: Sequencing a Property's Path Toward Vacancy
Quality data and analysis are fundamental to the successful development and implementation of policy solutions to help solve the region’s vacant-buildings problem, but, in many cases, data gaps exist that make it difficult to answer key questions about property status and housing market conditions. IHS is working to utilize...
Introducing Residential Vacancy Data on the IHS Data Portal
Few factors are as indicative of the strength or weakness of a neighborhood housing market as the level of long-term residential vacancy. And yet, reliable and easy-to-interpret data on residential vacancy are hard to collect and even harder to find. One reason for this is because collecting vacancy data requires...
Examining Cash Purchases of Residential Property in Cook County
It is generally assumed that the vast majority of residential property purchases are financed with a mortgage. While this is still often the case, one of the many ways in which the U.S. housing market has changed in the wake of the foreclosure crisis is that the share of residential...
Solving a Very Different Kind of Housing Crisis
The Cook County Assessor’s Office, responsible for setting values for each of Cook County’s 1.8 million parcels, divides the county’s buildings into 107 different categories – most of them familiar: residential buildings broken out by number of stories and units, commercial buildings by type of use and height (gas stations,...
