Glen Ellyn

Glen Ellyn is about seven square miles, twenty four miles due west of downtown Chicago, with roughly 28,800 people. It has one Metra station on the Union Pacific West line, fare Zone 4, with 772 parking spaces across 10 lots, and the ride to Ogilvie runs somewhere around forty minutes on a weekday. Elementary and middle school is Glen Ellyn School District 41, six schools and 3,482 students. High school is Glenbard District 87, and two of its four high schools are in Glen Ellyn. College of DuPage is here too, on 254 acres, the largest community college in Illinois. The Illinois Prairie Path cuts straight through the village, and Lake Ellyn has been sitting in the middle of town since a dam went in back in 1889.

The spread inside town is the thing to pay attention to, not the average. Glen Ellyn has real hills, and the streets climbing up toward Glenbard West look and price nothing like the flatter blocks out toward Roosevelt Road. Older prewar houses near downtown, postwar ranches to the north, newer construction scattered through. Two houses the same size, one mile apart, can be a hundred thousand dollars apart here and both be fairly priced. So do not shop by the town number. Shop by the block, then check the town number to make sure the block is not crazy.

Here is what the $470,000 actually is. I take every normal sale of a home in Glen Ellyn over a rolling three year window and find the middle one. Half sold above, half below. Normal sale is doing real work in that sentence. Foreclosures, bank owned sales, sales between relatives and court ordered sales all come out, because those are not prices a regular buyer competes with. That leaves 1,502 sales over the 2023 to 2025 window, plenty to keep any one unusual house from tugging 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. And while we are being straight with each other, look at 2019 on the chart. It dipped, from $366,000 to $354,000. That is real, it happened, and the town made it all back and then some by 2021.

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. Glen Ellyn is mostly houses, so mixing condos and townhomes in pulls the middle number a bit below what a house actually costs.

Now the number that tells you what kind of purchase this is. Glen Ellyn is up 28% since 2018, about 3.6% a year. Over the same years Aurora is up 68%, Elgin 71%, Plainfield 65% and Naperville 60%. Glen Ellyn moved at less than a third of that pace. That is information, not a criticism. Glen Ellyn was already one of the more expensive towns on the west side in 2018, so it had far less catching up to do than the towns that were cheap then. If you came here expecting fast appreciation, that is not what the record shows. If you have been saving for a couple of years and worrying the town was pulling away from you, the record says it has been moving at a walk. Steady is not exciting, but steady is buyable.

The tax rate here will look alarming until you know the trick, so here it is. The composite rate for Glen Ellyn's main tax code is 7.1442 per $100, down from 7.4451 the year before. That is not 7% of what your house is worth. Illinois assesses homes outside Cook County at about one third of market value, so a $470,000 house is assessed near $157,000, and the rate runs against that. Subtract the $8,000 general homestead exemption for living in the home you own and you land around $10,600 a year. That is a real line in your budget and it belongs in your monthly number from the first showing, not the last one. That rate is buying the two high schools, the six grade schools, the park district, the library and the community college down the road. In Glen Ellyn you can see exactly where it goes, which is more than most towns can say.