The Chicago North Shore has a fairly transient population, which has helped to keep the real estate market moving forward. If it were not for the number of large corporations and universities located in the area, property sales would have been badly pinched, like other parts of the country.
Barron’s seems to think the market woes might be short-lived. There are signs, the real estate market might have already reached a bottom.
This real-estate rout has been more painful than prior ones, but it may be shorter-lived. Indeed, there are early signs of recovery.
A FEW YEARS AGO, AN ACQUAINTANCE SENT Wellesley College economist Karl “Chip” Case a T-shirt depicting a cartoon of a smiley-face house surrounded by soap bubbles, called “Mr. Housing Bubble.” But it was the words captured in a comic-book cloud on the shirt that gave this otherwise goofy image its bite: “If I pop, you’re screwed!”
The dark humor hardly was lost on Case, co-creator along with Yale economist Robert Shiller of the now-canonical S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. In pairing recent sale prices of U.S. homes with the prices those same homes fetched previously, the index is substantiating what every sentient American knows: The U.S. housing market is in a deep funk, probably the worst in 50 years, according to Harvard’s respected Joint Center for Housing Studies.
