Chicagoland Area Real Estate Blog & News

Understanding Illinois Transfer Taxes

Transfer tax amounts and who pays them vary based on location.

Today I’ll talk about closing costs, particularly transfer tax. When you sell a property in Illinois, you will have a state transfer tax of $0.50 per $500 of the sales price. Every county in Illinois also charges you $0.25 for every $500 of the sale price sales price. Some villages will also charge you.

80% of the time, these transfer taxes are paid by the seller. If you’re a buyer, be prepared to face the uncommon situation where you’ll need to pay instead. For example, Harwood Heights charges the buyer $10 per $1,000 of the sales price as a transfer tax while Cicero charges the sellers that same amount. Chicago actually charges both parties.

If you're interested, I have a list of transfer tax charges by location, and I’m happy to send that to you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call or email me. I look forward to hearing from you.

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How Has the Market Changed in the Last 4 Years?

Here’s what you need to know about the latest statistics from 2021.

 

It’s hard to believe we’re already in 2022! Many people take the new year as an opportunity to reflect, and we want to do the same. We’ve pulled three important market statistics from 2021 so we can do year-over-year comparisons all the way back to 2018. 

 

The first stat we want to look at is the months’ supply of homes. This number measures inventory, and it refers to the number of months it would take for every home currently listed to sell. In 2018 we had 3.2 months’ supply of homes, in 2019 we had 3.2, in 2020 we had 2.1, and in 2021 we had 1.2. Keep in mind that six months of supply is considered a balanced market, so these numbers are crazy. We expect these numbers to climb slightly soon since people will be preparing their homes for the spring. 

We can see a big difference between our pre- and post-pandemic markets.

Next, let’s take a look at the average sales price. In 2018 it was $290,000, in 2019 it was $299,000, in 2020 it was $336,000, and in 2021 it was $366,000. Just like with months’ supply of homes, we can see a big difference between our pre-and post-pandemic markets. It will be interesting to see how much homes appreciate this year. 

 

The last statistic we want to talk about is the average days on market, and it measures how long it takes a property to sell. In 2018 it was 86 days, in 2019 it...