Untitled Document
Rick Hanselman knows his way around the Springfield
housing market. Lately the president of The Real Estate Group, a
local residential and commercial real-estate brokerage, has worked in the
Panther Creek area, and he says he’s witnessed an upswing in sales of
homes priced at $300,000 or more. “That’s more active than I’ve seen
in the past,” Hanselman says. “It has always been steady, but
now I see a spike.”
Hanselman, who attributes this latest trend to
increased hiring within Springfield’s medical community, says that
for the most part the housing market here remains stable thanks to the
city’s steady economy. Phil Chiles, president of the Capital Area
Association of Realtors, agrees that the two factors normally go hand in
hand. Springfield doesn’t experience a large
fluctuation of jobs, he says, or a sudden housing need like other cities
that are building new plants or factories do. Even though the area has seen
a loss of state-government jobs over the past few years, most have been
made up for by the boost in jobs at city hospitals and clinics, he says. Chiles says the absence of huge flows of people in or
out of the city correlates directly to Springfield’s gradual increase
in home sales prices. According to a 2007 report released by the CAAR,
Springfield’s median sales price for existing single-family homes was
$104,500, up 5.6 percent from the 2006 median sales price of $99,000. “What that says is that home values are
increasing, because the median means there are half as many over and under
that number,” Chiles explains. “If the median increases, that
means the whole market is going up.”
Since 2005 Springfield has seen a 14.4 percent
increase in its median home sales price, according to data from the
National Association of Realtors, comparing favorably to other
central-Illinois cities such as Decatur and Bloomington-Normal, which
experienced decreases of 15.9 and 4 percent, respectively. Springfield even surpassed cities known to have
fairly stable housing markets, such as Champaign-Urbana, up 1.4 percent,
and Peoria, up 8.8 percent. Real-estate agents are also encouraged by a recent
upturn in home sales, which they say was once a sore spot for Springfield.
In October, Springfield joined other cities across
the country experiencing a true buyer’s market. The city had more
than 2,000 homes listed for sale — the highest inventory it had ever
seen. Chiles says that that figure has dropped to the 1,600 range, showing
progress for the next year. “We just had a bump in the road when all of
these other markets had huge declines,” he says. “We feel like
we’ve been very fortunate.”
Contact Amanda Robert at arobert@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2008.
