Homebuilders around Chicago are enjoying the best sales they’ve had in more than a decade. The cheers you hear are coming mostly from Wall Street.
Why Wall Street? Today, the half-dozen largest-volume homebuilders in the metro Chicago market are publicly-traded companies. The market is led by Texas-based mega-builder D.R. Horton, which recorded 665 sales here in the first nine months of 2020, followed by such names as Pulte Homes and Ryan and K. Hovnanian. Together the public builders account for 75 percent of all local new-home construction.
But now the private builders that have been able to hang on in the face of this onslaught are poised for a comeback as new-home sales around Chicago’s suburbs are suddenly surging. At the end of December the inventory of homes on the market amounted to a mere 1.8 months of supply, a record low since statistics gathering started in 2008. An inventory of closer to six months is considered average.
Picture Source: bloomberg
