Chicago Agent Magazine featured me in the cover story for their January 2022 issue. Here are a few excerpts:
Buyers are flocking to neighborhoods, because immediate proximity to amenities is not as important as in the past, as fewer people are using public transportation and going out to restaurants and bars in the same way, said Jason O’Beirne, a real estate broker with Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty. “With the availability of delivery services, they would rather have an extra room, backyard or finished basement,” he said. “The trade-off seems easy when they look at the way they live in this 2021 world.”
Still, O’Beirne has seen talk of interest rate hikes push buyers to make decisions at a time of year when business is typically slower. “The market is hotter than normal for this season,” he said. “The buyers that perhaps were buying a condo, now they want a town home, or the buyers that were buying a town home want a small, single-family home, and the buyers who were buying a small single-family home want a big single-family home. The common theme is they want to live in a similar area, but they want more space.”
Nationwide, O’Beirne said workers are creating more permanent work-from-home situations and want homes with more bedrooms and more separation of space — areas portioned off for privacy.
Although interest rates may cause some temporary pauses in the market, O’Beirne anticipates 2022 will be much like 2021. “People will have the same desires in housing that were influenced by the pandemic, perhaps for decades to come.”
If you want to know more about the current real estate market and to hear from a couple of my colleagues, you can read the entire article here.
