Chicago’s ultra-luxury market is hot and sales are soaring. While overall sales in Chicago were down 9.3 percent in the third quarter, sales of homes priced at $3 million or more have soared; usually there are between six and 16 sales in that price range in a given year but in the last quarter there were 26.
Those sales included both houses and condos. The most expensive condo sold was at the Palmolive building, for $5.25 million while the most expensive house was in the Gold Coast, $7.4 milion for 1518 N Astor.
Related Midwest is seeking a record price for its apartment building in downtown Chicago - $328 million or about $650,000 per unit.
The 60-story tower at 111 W. Wacker Dr. was completed over the summer and contains a total of 504 units.
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The ballooning size of student loan debt is quietly draining sales from the U.S. housing market. Over the last 11 years, student loan debt has ballooned from $241 billion to $1.1 trillion, a more than four-fold increase.
While analysts haven’t yet agreed on what the exact impact has been, a new study by John Burns Real Estate Consulting that was reported on by the Wall Street Journal has concluded that in the year 2014, there will be a total of 414,000 home purchases that were lost to student debt.
Assuming that a typical home cost $200,000 that suggests a lost sales volume of $83 billion.