Real Estate Trend Down in Area, Up in Deerfield

With more and more Chicago area home sellers forced to walk away with little or no money that is not the case in Highland Park and Deerfield, according to managing real estate brokers in those communities.

In the 14-county area that includes nine in Illinois, four in northwest Indiana and Kenosha in Wisconsin, there were approximately 24,000 short sales for the first eight months of the year, according to  report in Chicago Real Estate Daily. There were 9,934 for the same period last year.

 A short sale occurs when a mortgage holder agrees to take less than the amount due because the market value of the house is smaller than the loan balance, according to the Chicago Real Estate Daily story.

The situation on the North Shore is reversed, according to the information provided by the North Shore Barrington Board of Realtors. There were 61 short sales in local area for the first eight months of this year and 98 for the same period in 2012.

Those numbers come as no surprise to Steve Kolko, managing broker for Coldwell Banker in Highland Park and his Deerfield counterpart, Carol Strauss, also of Coldwell Banker. “We’re doing fewer,” Strauss said of the Deerfield market. “I know we are not doing as many as last year.”

Kolko does not believe there is an increase in Highland Park and sees the downward trend continuing. “I don’t see that,” he said explaining the City’s real estate market was doing better than the Chicago area overall. “If anything we have been trending down.”