Lombard

Lombard has its own Metra station at 20 S. Main Street, right in the middle of the old downtown. Metra puts it in fare Zone 3, and it is 19.9 miles from Ogilvie Transportation Center downtown. The station has 574 parking spaces spread across 11 lots. Parking near a train station is usually the first thing people worry about, and here is the good part: 324 of those spaces are daily only, so you do not need a permit or a waiting list to just try it for a week and see if the commute works for you. Going west, the same line keeps rolling through Glen Ellyn, Wheaton, Winfield and West Chicago. Going east it hits Villa Park and Elmhurst before it gets to the city. Lombard sits right in the middle of that chain.

Here is what I see in the sale records. I use a three-year rolling median, which just means I take three years of sales at a time and find the middle one, so a couple of weird sales cannot yank the number around. In Lombard that number went $235K in 2018, $244K in 2019, $254K in 2020, $258K in 2021, $270K in 2022, $285K in 2023, $320K in 2024, and $336K in 2025. That is up 43% since 2018. It is built on 2,177 sales in the 2023 through 2025 window, so it is a thick sample, not a handful of houses. The source is the Illinois Department of Revenue MyDec transfer declarations on the state open data portal. I kept only arms-length sales, meaning normal deals between strangers: single parcel, over $10,000, with foreclosures, bank-owned resales, family transfers and court-ordered sales taken out.

Two things about that number you should know before you use it. First, the series starts in 2018 and not 2013 like my Chicago neighborhood pages. That is because Illinois only started collecting these records electronically outside Cook County around then. It is where the record begins. Second, the number covers all homes together: houses, condos, townhomes and duplexes. Outside Cook County the state does not publish a class that separates a house from a condo from a duplex, so I cannot split them. A duplex, by the way, is what people in Chicago call a two-flat. One building, two homes stacked or side by side. So $336K is the middle of everything in Lombard, and the spread underneath it is wide. A townhome off Finley Road and a four bedroom on a big lot near Lilacia Park are not the same purchase. The subdivision matters. The block matters. Which school your kid walks to matters. Do not shop the median. Shop the street.

On rent, be careful with the easy numbers. RentCafe reports Lombard apartments at $2,333 for a two bedroom and $2,732 for a three bedroom as of August 2, 2026, up 4.52% over the year before. But read their fine print: that only counts buildings with 50 or more units. Most rentals in Lombard are not in big complexes. They are houses, townhomes and small buildings, and none of those are in that sample. So treat it as one data point, not the answer. A second, steadier benchmark is HUD Fair Market Rent, which is the federal government's estimate of what a decent standard unit rents for in a county. For FY2026, DuPage County sits in the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville HUD Metro area at $1,781 for a two bedroom and $2,294 for a three bedroom. The Census Bureau also puts Lombard's median gross rent at $1,948 across all sizes for 2020 to 2024. Those three sources bracket the truth. If you are buying a rental here, get real signed leases on comparable units before you write an offer.

Taxes in DuPage are printed in plain sight, which I like. The DuPage County Clerk's 2024 tax rate booklet lists Lombard in York Township under tax code 6011 at a rate of 7.7695, down from 8.0415 the year before. Now, 7.77 sounds enormous, and it is not. Illinois does not tax your market value. State law says property outside Cook County is assessed at "33 1/3% of its fair cash value," so the taxable number is about one third of what the house is worth. The rate is charged per $100 of that one-third figure. So a $336,000 house carries roughly $112,000 in assessed value, and 7.7695 per $100 of that lands around $8,700 before any exemptions come off. Owner exemptions bring it down from there. Lombard also spans more than one township and more than one tax code, so pull the actual rate for the actual parcel from the Clerk before you count on a number. It is a free lookup and it takes two minutes.

What Lombard is actually like: it is an old railroad town that grew up around its station and never lost the middle. The downtown is walkable, the village runs facade and restaurant grants to keep storefronts full, and there are three tax increment financing districts working on it, which is a tool towns use to funnel new property tax growth back into the area it came from. Kids go to Lombard School District 44 for pre-K through eighth grade, eight schools in all, then to Glenbard East or Glenbard South in Glenbard Township High School District 87. On the south end you have Yorktown Center, which is in the middle of a real rebuild: The Square at Yorktown park and retail is open, and more than 700 new homes are going up on the old department store land, with the first phase due in spring 2026. And then there is Lilacia Park, 8.5 acres of lilacs and tulips that got put on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019. The first two weeks of every May the town goes all in on it. Tours, concerts, a parade. It is a genuinely charming thing for a place this ordinary-looking to have.

Who Lombard fits: somebody who wants the train, wants a yard, and does not want to pay Glen Ellyn or Elmhurst money to get both. The Census puts Lombard's population at 44,399 in 2025, basically flat since 2020, with about 71% of homes owner occupied. Flat population is not a problem here. It means the housing you are buying already exists and you are not competing with a construction boom. Prices still moved 43% since 2018 without the town adding people, which tells you demand came from people wanting in. If you are buying your first place, the entry point is real. If you are buying a small rental, the thing to check is whether the rent on that specific unit covers the tax bill, because the taxes are the biggest line item out here. Run that one number and you will know more than most buyers walking in.