Elmhurst

Start with the train, because most people here do. Elmhurst has one Metra station on the Union Pacific West line, fare Zone 3, with 1,487 parking spaces across 25 lots. The ride to Ogilvie runs a little over half an hour on a normal weekday. The station sits in the middle of downtown, so the coffee, the theater, the restaurants and the platform are all the same few blocks. Elmhurst University is about a mile away with just under 4,000 students. The public schools are one unit district, Elmhurst Community Unit School District 205, 13 schools and 8,280 students from pre-K through high school. One district, one train. That simplicity is a real part of what people are buying.

Now the part that actually decides your price. Elmhurst is a little over ten square miles and the spread inside those ten miles is wide. A 1950s three bedroom on a modest lot and a rebuilt house four blocks from the platform are both Elmhurst, and they are nowhere near the same purchase. Elmhurst has also flooded after big rains, and the city has been spending years on stormwater work to fix it, including a quarry that holds 8,300 acre feet when Salt Creek runs high. Here is the way around it: flooding in this town is block specific and it is documented. Ask the city about the block, ask the seller about the basement, and look at what the stormwater plan has already built nearby. You are not guessing. The information exists.

When I say the middle price in Elmhurst is $520,000, here is exactly what that means. I take every normal sale of a home in town over a rolling three year window and find the one in the middle. Half sold for more, half for less. Normal sale is the important filter. I throw out foreclosures, bank owned sales, sales between family members and anything a court ordered, because those prices are not what a regular buyer pays. Over the 2023 to 2025 window that leaves 1,802 sales, a big enough pile that one weird mansion does not move the line.

My Chicago pages start in 2013. This one starts in 2018, and I would rather just tell you why. Illinois only began collecting these sale records electronically outside Cook County around then. That is simply where the record begins. Nothing is missing and nothing is hidden. The DuPage records begin in the middle of 2017.

One more thing about what the number covers. Outside Cook County the state does not publish a code that tells a single family house apart from a condo or a duplex. A duplex is what we call a two-flat in Chicago, one building holding two separate homes. So this figure is all of them mixed together. If you are shopping for a house, plan to look above that line. If you are shopping for a townhome or a condo, you will find plenty below it. Same data, different starting point. In a town that is mostly houses, that pulls the middle number down a little, because condos and townhomes sell for less than houses do.

Here is the fact that tells you what kind of purchase Elmhurst is. Since 2018 Elmhurst is up 30%, about 3.8% a year. Across the same years Aurora is up 68%, Elgin 71%, Plainfield 65% and Naperville 60%. Elmhurst grew at less than a third of that pace. That is not a knock on the town and it is not a warning. It is information about the starting line. Elmhurst was already expensive in 2018, so it had less room to run than the towns that were cheap then and are not cheap now. If you were hoping to buy here and ride a rocket, that is not the trade on the table. If you were worried the town was going to sprint away from you while you saved, the record says it has been walking. For a lot of buyers that second thing is the better news.

The tax rate is going to look scary the first time you read it, so let me take the scare out of it. The composite rate for the main Elmhurst tax code is 6.0266 per $100. That is not 6% of your home's value. Illinois assesses homes outside Cook County at about one third of market value, so a $520,000 house is assessed near $173,000, and the rate applies to that. Take off the $8,000 general homestead exemption you get for living in the home you own and the math lands around $9,900 a year. Real money, and worth putting in your monthly number from day one. It is also part of why the price here grew slowly, because a high carrying cost keeps a lid on what buyers will bid. In Elmhurst that bill is visible and the trade is out in the open.