Where are buyers getting the biggest discounts?

While the number and speed of price reductions is certainly interesting information (to some), what really matters to folks out there in the market right now is the size of price reductions. Better yet, how receptive are sellers to accepting an offer below their asking price?

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Where are buyers currently getting the biggest discount off the asking price in Cook County? Knowing which neighborhoods are softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price will better equip you when making an offer.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from the last three and a half months from all of Cook County and sorted it by city. We calculated the overall difference between the sale price and the list price. Note that this reflects the final list price, after all price drops in the listing. Any cities with fewer than ten sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings, but interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel 2007 format.

Here are the top ten cities with the largest overall discount:

The largest discounts were in the south county towns of Harvey and neighboring Markham, where sellers are accepting discounted offers on homes that are already cheap to begin with. Cities with large discounts ranged all across the board of affordability, with Harvey at the low-price end at an average sold price of just $33,193, and lakeside Glencoe at the high end with an average sold price of $1,075,225.

33 of the 94 cities we ranked came in with discounts under 5%, indicating that either buyers are more willing to pay asking price or sellers in those regions are better at pricing their homes appropriately to the market in the first place.

Of the 8,111 sales we tracked in the 3.5-month period, 355 homes (4.3%) sold for 20% or more off the asking price, and 1,323 homes (16.3%) sold for 10% or more off the asking price. 994 homes (12.3%) sold for more than asking price.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this data once we have been able to run it for a number of months, to see which cities are trending toward larger discounts and which are trending toward selling at full price.

I think the takeaway from this data is that when crafting an offer, buyers should be aware that not all cities are created equal. While an offer 10% below list price may be accepted in a neighborhood where buyers are few and far between, some areas are still seeing enough interest to command full price or even more.