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Every week I get a version of the same text from a client: “Did you see rates are finally coming down?” This week, they’re not wrong: mortgage rates ticked lower for the first time in six weeks, and national coverage is leaning hard into a “buyers are gaining ground” narrative. Inventory is up. List prices are down for an eighth straight month nationally. It sounds like the market is turning. |
| 1. Supply Is Loosening. It's Not Loose. |
DuPage County’s months of supply climbed to 1.7 in July, the highest reading in the past 19 months, and a touch above the 1.6 we saw a year ago. That’s a real trend, and it means buyers do have marginally more to choose from than they did last summer. But a “balanced” market starts at 6 months of supply. We’re not a third of the way there. And the picture varies sharply by town: Wheaton, the tightest of our four tracked western communities, is sitting at just 1.1 months, essentially flat with a year ago. Warrenville has loosened the most, moving from 1.3 to 2.1 months, but even that is still deep in seller’s-market territory.  |
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They don't. DuPage County’s median sales price (rolling 12 months) rose to $432,000 in July, up 5.4% from $410,000 a year earlier. Wheaton is up 7.7% to $495,000. Even Warrenville, the loosest of our four western towns at 2.1 months of supply, held firm at $350,000, up 6.1% year-over-year. No softening, no discount, no sign of buyers dictating price. That combination, supply up, market time roughly flat, price still climbing, isn’t what a market looks like when buyers are in control. It’s what a market looks like when demand is simply outrunning a slowly recovering supply. |
  The Bottom Line The Fed meets again on September 16, and futures markets have it close to a coin flip on whether they cut. That kind of uncertainty is exactly why waiting for a bigger rate move rarely pays off the way people hope, while you wait, DuPage values keep climbing underneath you. If you’re equity-rich and rate-handcuffed in Carol Stream, Lombard, or West Chicago and eyeing a move to Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Winfield, or Warrenville, the math still favors moving on your terms now rather than waiting for a national headline that was never describing this market in the first place. |
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