Last year 1,424 homes in Chicago sold for $100,000 or less. Lenders wrote 289 purchase mortgages that size. Not 289 in those neighborhoods, or on those particular houses: 289 in the entire city, across every price band under six figures. The cheapest homes in Chicago keep changing hands, and the small mortgages that would finance them are being written in a tiny fraction of that number.
Homes sold at or under $100,000, and the small mortgages written
Chicago community areas with at least 25 such sales in 2025. The bar shows how much of that market was financed with a loan of $100,000 or less.
- Englewood2 financed of 72 sold
- Loop2 financed of 65 sold
- West Englewood4 financed of 100 sold
- Chatham2 financed of 42 sold
- South Shore4 financed of 76 sold
- New City2 financed of 31 sold
- Auburn Gresham4 financed of 59 sold
- Roseland17 financed of 130 sold
- Greater Grand Crossing8 financed of 57 sold
- Washington Heights6 financed of 41 sold
- Near North Side12 financed of 81 sold
- West Pullman19 financed of 108 sold
- South Chicago11 financed of 61 sold
- South Deering10 financed of 42 sold
Sales: arms-length recorded sales, Cook County Assessor. Loans: first-lien home purchase originations, federal HMDA data. Two separate record systems, counted, not matched.
What these numbers are, and what they are not
Two public records, counted side by side: federal mortgage-disclosure filings (every covered lender must report each home-purchase loan) and Cook County’s recorded sales. They are not matched transaction to transaction, and a sale with no purchase mortgage behind it does not automatically mean a cash buyer. It can also be a lender too small to file federal reports, seller financing, or a land contract. These records show that the ordinary mortgage is missing. They cannot show what replaced it.
In West Englewood, 100 homes sold at or under $100,000 and four small purchase mortgages were written. In Englewood the count was 72 and two. In Chatham, 42 and two. These are not marginal markets: they are hundreds of transactions a year, in neighborhoods with tens of thousands of residents, and the small-mortgage counts beside them are in the single digits.
What it means when a home sells without a loan
It is tempting to read this as a story about cash investors, and some of it is. But the honest answer is that a recorded sale with no matching purchase mortgage can mean at least four different things, and these records cannot tell them apart. It can be a cash buyer, which in this price range often means an investor. It can be a lender too small to file federal disclosure reports, since not every institution is covered. It can be seller financing. Or it can be a land contract, in which the buyer makes payments for years without holding the deed, an arrangement with a long and painful history on Chicago’s South and West Sides.
Those possibilities point in very different directions. One is an investor with capital; another is a family taking on a deal with far fewer protections than a mortgage carries. We are not able to say which of them accounts for the gap, and anyone who tells you they can from public sale records alone is guessing. What the numbers do establish is the size of the space where the ordinary mortgage is absent.
The gap is not only about cheap houses
- South Shore188 loans / 295 sales0.64
- Englewood140 loans / 204 sales0.69
- Hyde Park148 loans / 203 sales0.73
- Chatham167 loans / 224 sales0.75
- West Englewood202 loans / 270 sales0.75
- Roseland319 loans / 416 sales0.77
- West Pullman243 loans / 304 sales0.80
- South Chicago163 loans / 200 sales0.81
- North Lawndale156 loans / 189 sales0.82
- Washington Heights206 loans / 249 sales0.83
Purchase mortgages per recorded sale, 2025. Citywide the ratio is about one to one.
Across Chicago in 2025 there were 20,034 first-lien purchase mortgages against 19,720 recorded arms-length sales of one-to-four-unit homes, close to one for one. The neighborhoods above run well below that. South Shore saw about two purchase loans for every three sales. Englewood, Chatham, West Englewood, and West Garfield Park all sit near three loans for every four.
One entry on that list is there for a different reason. Hyde Park’s ratio is low, but its cheap sales and its small loans match each other almost exactly, eight and eight. Its gap is more likely a feature of the neighborhood’s large cooperative housing stock, where a share purchase is not recorded as a conventional mortgage. It is a reminder that a low ratio has more than one cause.
Who is getting the loans that do get written
The federal data flags whether a loan is for a principal residence or an investment property. Citywide, 11 percent of Chicago purchase mortgages in 2025 were for investment properties. In West Garfield Park it was 25 percent, in North Lawndale 24 percent, and in South Shore 22 percent. The neighborhoods where owner-occupant borrowing is hardest to find are the same ones where a larger share of the lending that does happen is going to landlords, a pattern consistent with what our deed analysis found on the buying side.
Why this is on the table right now
The federal housing law that took effect on July 11, 2026 contains a section that drew little notice. Sections 401 and 402 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (provision summary) direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to examine the compensation rules and the points-and-fees thresholds that apply to mortgages of $100,000 or less, the loans lenders most often say are not worth writing. When we graded that law against Chicago a week ago, we marked those sections as the ones with the most to grip here. This is the evidence behind that grade.
None of which is new ground for the people who study it. The Woodstock Institute has documented Chicago lending disparity down to the neighborhood since the 1980s and now runs a public lending data portal; read them for the long view and the fair-lending analysis. What we have added here is narrower: we put the loan record next to the deed record and counted the difference.
How we counted
- Loans: federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records for Cook County, 2025, pulled from the CFPB Data Browser on July 19, 2026. We kept only originated loans (action taken 1), for home purchase (not refinances, which are about a third of all originations), first liens only (a second, piggyback lien would double-count one purchase), on one-to-four-unit dwellings.
- Sales: our own tabulation of arms-length, single-parcel recorded sales from the Cook County Assessor, 2025, for houses, condominiums, and two-to-six-flats. Condominiums are included because federal data counts a condo purchase as a single-family loan; leaving them out inflates the loan-to-sale ratio badly. The universes are close but not identical: the Assessor class we use for flats covers two- to six-unit buildings, while the federal loan data we kept covers one to four units, so a small number of five- and six-flat sales have no eligible loan counterpart.
- Neighborhoods: loans carry a census tract, not a community area. We placed each 2020 tract using the Census Bureau’s own published centroid and the city’s community-area boundaries. A tract straddling a boundary lands wholly on one side.
- What this is not: a matched record. We are counting two separate systems and comparing the totals, not tying each loan to a deed. Ratios above one appear in new-construction areas, where a loan on a newly built unit has no prior parcel sale to pair with, which is why this piece stays with the neighborhoods below one.
- Loan size is not price: a mortgage of $100,000 or less can sit on a more expensive home after a down payment, so the count of small loans overstates, if anything, how many cheap homes were financed.
Computed by KCM Desk from 2025 federal lending records and Cook County sale records; published July 19, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.