At Least 1,532 Chicago Homes Sold for $100,000 or Less in 2025. Lenders Wrote 289 Mortgages That Size.

In 2025 at least 1,532 homes in Chicago sold for $100,000 or less, and lenders wrote 289 purchase mortgages of that size in the whole city: fewer than one for every five such sales. The sales count is a minimum, because the county is still recording 2025 sales. The loan count came back the same on two readings of the federal file.

Correction, September 30, 2026: when this page was published on July 19, 2026, its headline said 1,424 Chicago homes sold for under $100,000 in 2025, and it counted 19,720 sales for the year. (The count behind that headline took in sales at exactly $100,000 too, the same cutoff used on this page.) Both figures were wrong, for two reasons. The county’s sales file had not finished with 2025: on the file as it stood after its September 15, 2026 update, the same count returns 1,840 and 25,222. And 308 of those 1,840 were not homes: the Assessor flags them as parking spaces, storage units or building common areas, which are recorded and sold as condominium parcels, most of them in and around downtown. With those removed, 1,532 homes sold at or under $100,000, out of 24,885 sales. The first version’s chart listed the Loop and the Near North Side among the places where cheap homes sold without small mortgages. Every Loop sale at that price, and all but one on the Near North Side, carried that flag, and both rows are gone. The first version also called the citywide ratio of purchase mortgages to sales “close to one for one”; on the fuller count it is about four purchase loans for every five sales. The loan figures did not change. The description of the federal law near the end of the page was also rewritten, from the enacted text.

In West Englewood, 124 homes sold at or under $100,000 and four small purchase mortgages were written. In Englewood the counts were 93 and two. In Chatham, 56 and two. Together those three community areas recorded 273 such sales in a year, against eight small purchase mortgages.

What a sale without a purchase mortgage can be

Is this a story about cash investors? Some of it may be, and these records cannot say how much. A recorded sale with no matching purchase mortgage can be at least four different things. It can be a cash buyer. It can be a loan that went unreported, since the federal rules do not cover every lender or every loan. It can be seller financing. Or it can be a land contract, in which the buyer makes payments for years and receives the deed only at the end.

Those possibilities point in different directions. One is a buyer with capital; another is a household taking on a deal with fewer of the protections a mortgage carries. The two files cannot tell them apart, so we do not say which accounts for the gap. What the counts do establish is the size of the gap between recorded sales and reported purchase loans.

The gap is not only at the bottom of the price range

1. South Shore188 loans / 386 sales0.49
2. Englewood140 loans / 260 sales0.54
3. Hyde Park148 loans / 263 sales0.56
4. Chatham167 loans / 296 sales0.56
5. West Englewood202 loans / 347 sales0.58
6. Roseland319 loans / 541 sales0.59
7. South Chicago163 loans / 271 sales0.60
8. West Pullman243 loans / 396 sales0.61
9. North Lawndale156 loans / 249 sales0.63
10. Greater Grand Crossing199 loans / 312 sales0.64

Purchase mortgages per recorded sale of a home, 2025: the ten lowest among the 55 community areas with at least 150 sales. Citywide the ratio is 0.81.

Across Chicago in 2025 there were 20,034 purchase mortgages against 24,885 recorded sales of homes, about four loans for every five sales. Of the 55 community areas with at least 150 sales, 32 fall below that citywide ratio, and the ten lowest are listed above. South Shore had about one purchase loan for every two sales. If the county adds more 2025 sales, as it has been doing, these ratios fall further.

Hyde Park is on that list with a different profile from the rest: only nine of its 263 recorded sales were at or under $100,000. Why its loan count runs so far below its sales, these two files do not show. A low ratio has more than one possible cause.

Two community areas run the other way. The Near South Side and the Near West Side each show more purchase loans than recorded sales. One possible reason is new construction: a sale of a new unit can be recorded before its parcel carries a residential class, and our sales filter would miss it. We have not verified that, which is why the list above stays with the low end.

What the loans that are written are for

The federal file records whether a loan is for a principal residence, a second home 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 three highest shares among community areas with at least 60 purchase loans. All three also have fewer purchase loans per sale than the city as a whole, a pattern consistent with what our analysis of buyers on the deeds found.

Why the $100,000 line

We drew the line at $100,000 because the new federal housing law draws it there. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101) became law on July 11, 2026. Its section 401 orders the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to report to Congress on how mortgage loan originators are paid and what that does to the availability of mortgages of $100,000 or less. Section 402 orders the bureau to evaluate how its points-and-fees thresholds affect mortgages under $100,000. Section 105 allows the Federal Housing Administration to set up a pilot program for mortgages of $100,000 or less. A report and an evaluation are not a rule change. In our reading of that law against Chicago’s records, these are the sections that match the city’s records most closely, and the counts on this page are the evidence for that.

Others have studied this far longer than we have. The Woodstock Institute has documented lending disparities across Chicago since the 1980s and runs a public lending data portal; read them for the long view and the fair-lending analysis. What this page adds is narrower: the loan record set next to the deed record, and the difference counted.

How we counted

• Loans: federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records for Cook County, 2025, from the CFPB Data Browser (Cook County, loans originated, home purchase), read on July 19, 2026 and again on September 30, 2026. The browser serves 2025 from a fixed snapshot, and every loan count on this page came back the same on both dates. We kept only originated loans, for home purchase (refinances, about a third of all originations, are out), first liens only (a second, piggyback lien would count one purchase twice), on one-to-four-unit dwellings.
• Sales: our tabulation of recorded sales from the Cook County Assessor’s Parcel Sales file for 2025, as retrieved September 30, 2026 (file last updated September 15, 2026): houses, condominiums and two-to-six-flats, single-parcel sales that pass the Assessor’s screens for arms-length sales (sales between unrelated parties at a market price). Condominiums are included because the federal data counts a condo purchase as a single-family loan. The file is still adding 2025 sales, so every sales count here is a minimum.
• Parking and storage: condominium parcels that the Assessor flags as parking spaces, storage units or common areas in its condominium file are left out: 337 of the 25,222 sale records for 2025, and 308 of the 1,840 at or under $100,000. The Assessor describes that flag as an ongoing cleanup, so a few such parcels may remain.
• Not the same universe: the Assessor class we use for flats covers two- to six-unit buildings, while the federal loans we kept cover one to four units, so a small number of five- and six-flat sales have no eligible loan counterpart.
• Community areas: the 77 official statistical areas Chicago reports its numbers by. Loans carry a census tract, so we placed each 2020 tract by the Census Bureau’s published centroid inside the city’s community-area boundaries; a tract straddling a boundary lands wholly on one side. Sales are placed by the parcel’s own coordinates.
• What this is not: a matched record. We count two separate systems and compare the totals; no loan is tied to a deed.
• Loan size is not price: a mortgage of $100,000 or less can sit on a more expensive home after a down payment, and a loan that also covers renovation can be larger than the price of a cheaper one. The small-loan count and the small-sale count measure different things; they are set side by side here, not matched.

Computed by KCM Desk from 2025 federal lending records and Cook County sale records as retrieved September 30, 2026; first published July 19, 2026, corrected September 30, 2026. Human-guided and edited — about this desk. If you spot an error, corrections come first.

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