A listing shows what a seller hopes for, and the popular price tools show estimates. This page is built from what actually happened: the deeds. We pulled 241,653 market sales of Chicago houses, condos, and small apartment buildings from the Cook County Assessor’s public sales file, covering January 2018 through May 2026, and joined every sale to its community area. What follows is what buyers actually paid, in every neighborhood, with no modeling and no estimates.
The Assessor flags sales that are not real market transactions, such as deeds between family members, quitclaims, and repeat filings of the same sale. We kept only single-parcel sales that pass all of those screens. Medians below describe the middle sale of what actually traded; a neighborhood’s mix of what sells can shift from year to year, and no figure in this piece rests on fewer than 20 sales unless its exact count is shown beside it.
In this report: Flats vs. houses vs. condos · The rising floor · The gold rush · Million-dollar medians · The map · Method
The two-to-six-flat now costs more than a house or a condo
In 2018, the three kinds of Chicago home sold for nearly the same money. The median condo went for $249,500, the median two-to-six-unit building for $245,000, and the median house for $218,500. Seven years later they have split into three different markets. Houses are up 39 percent since 2019, to $320,000 in 2025. Condos are up 26 percent, to $328,000. And the two-to-six-flat, the brick workhorse that houses much of the city’s renters, is up 62 percent, to $445,000.
That order is new. The small apartment building used to be the cheap way into Chicago real estate. It is now the most expensive of these three home types by more than a hundred thousand dollars at the median, and its lead over houses widened in every full year of this record, 2018 through 2025. A building that rents out is being priced like the income stream it is, which is good news for anyone selling one and hard news for anyone hoping to live in one cheaply while renting out the other floors, the arrangement that built much of this city’s middle class.
The condo story runs the other way. Condos carried a $31,000 premium over houses in 2018. By 2025 that premium had shrunk to $8,000. In the Loop itself the median condo sold for $277,000 in 2019 and $292,000 in 2025, a gain of five percent across six years in which the city’s houses gained 39 percent. Downtown’s condo stock is the part of the market that has moved least since the pandemic, a pattern consistent with what our business-license analysis and our Red Line subway ridership both show from different angles.
The floor is rising fastest on the South Side
In 2019, twenty community areas had a median house sale under $150,000. In 2025, seven did: Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, North Lawndale, Roseland, South Chicago, South Deering, West Pullman.
The percentage gains behind that shift are the largest anywhere in Chicago. West Englewood’s median house sale went from $40,000 in 2019 to $150,500 in 2025, across 200 recorded sales in that final year. Englewood went from $32,341 to $119,950. Pullman went from $68,900 to $178,000, Roseland from $70,000 to $145,000, South Chicago from $71,600 to $146,250. Nothing on the North Side comes close in percentage terms.
Two honest cautions belong next to those numbers. A median that starts at $32,000 reflects a market where many sales were distressed, and part of the rise is the distress washing out of the mix rather than the same houses tripling in value. And a rising floor cuts both ways: it rebuilds equity for longtime owners on blocks that lost it for decades, and it makes the city’s cheapest homeownership meaningfully less cheap. The backdrop is a county that started growing again in 2023 after years of decline, and a metro that still trades people with its own suburbs more than with any other place.
Where the flats gold rush is running
The flats surge is not spread evenly. It is concentrated on the South and West Sides, and the numbers are steep. Woodlawn’s median two-to-six-flat sold for $190,000 in 2019 and $512,000 in 2025, across 77 recorded sales. Grand Boulevard went from $285,000 to $675,000. Washington Park went from $215,000 to $495,000. Austin, the West Side’s largest neighborhood, went from $215,000 to $375,000 across 198 sales, one of the deepest markets in the city.
Woodlawn borders the Obama Presidential Center site, and both its houses and its small apartment buildings have repriced: the median house sale there went from $114,678 to $350,000 over the same years, on modest counts (35 house sales recorded in 2019, 27 in 2025). Whether that reads as renewal or as pressure depends on which side of a lease you are on; the same buildings that are making sellers whole are the affordable rental stock of neighborhoods our South Shore renter-protections piece covered. The deeds do not say who was displaced. They do say what the buildings now cost.
Where the median house now costs a million dollars
At the other end of the map, four community areas now clear seven figures for the middle house that sells. The median house sale in North Center in 2025 was $1,650,000, with Lincoln Park at $1,599,500 and Lake View at $1,521,000, all on the North Side. West Town, officially a West Side community area though its buyers know it by neighborhood names like Wicker Park, crossed a million for the first time in this record at $1,085,250, after closing 2024 one thousand dollars short at $999,000. These are medians, not trophies: half of the houses that sold in those areas cost more.
The expensive core is also where prices grew slowest in percentage terms. The Near West Side gained 14 percent since 2019, Hyde Park 15 percent, the Near South Side 15 percent. In this file the fastest gains sit at the bottom of the price map and the slowest sit at the top, so the percentage gap between the cheapest and most expensive areas narrowed over these seven years. For national context, see our look at where Chicago sits in the housing-shortage rankings.
Watch seven years of prices move across the map
Drag the slider and the map repaints with each year’s recorded house medians. The far South Side brightens fastest; the North Side’s darkest blues barely move because they were dark already. Gray areas have fewer than 20 recorded house sales in that year, which in places like the Loop mostly means the housing there is condos.
Fewer homes are changing hands than at any point in this record
Behind every median is a shrinking pile of deeds. Chicago recorded 30,942 market sales of houses, condos, and small flats in 2019, 37,787 in the 2021 peak, and 19,720 in 2025, the fewest in this eight-year record even before allowing for a few late deeds still to be filed. One widely documented national explanation is rate lock-in: owners holding pandemic-era mortgages have little reason to sell. Our file records the result, not the cause. Either way the market is thin, and a thin market is exactly when a single year’s median in a small neighborhood should be read gently. Through May, 2026 is pacing close to 2025, with the citywide house median so far at $330,000.
How we computed this
- Sales: Cook County Assessor Parcel Sales file (dataset wvhk-k5uv), all recorded sales in Chicago’s eight townships, January 2018 through May 28, 2026, pulled July 18, 2026.
- Market filter: we kept only single-parcel sales that pass the Assessor’s own arms-length screens, which exclude repeat filings of the same sale within a year, sales under $10,000, and non-market deed types such as quitclaims.
- Home types: “houses” are Assessor classes 202–210, 234, 278, and 295 (detached homes and townhomes), “condos” are class 299, and “two-to-six-flats” are class 211 apartment buildings.
- Neighborhoods: each parcel’s coordinates from the Assessor’s Parcel Universe (nj4t-kc8j) were placed into the city’s 77 official community areas (boundaries dataset igwz-8jzy). All 241,653 sales joined; none fell outside.
- Reading the numbers: a median is the middle recorded sale, not an appraisal of any particular home; recorded prices can also differ from a buyer’s true net cost, since seller credits and concessions are not part of the deed. The mix of what sells shifts between years. We suppress figures built on fewer than 20 sales (10 in the lookup, where the count is shown). 2026 is partial and recent months are still filling in as deeds record.
Computed by KCM Desk from records current to May 28, 2026; published July 18, 2026. Full-year 2026 gets its own update in early 2027. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
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