Plainfield

Plainfield is about 35 miles southwest of the Loop. Most of it sits in Will County, with a piece spilling into Kendall County. It grew fast. About 4,500 people lived here in 1990. The 2020 census counted 44,762, and the July 2025 estimate is 50,043. So nearly everything you tour was built after 1995. The exception is the historic district on Lockport Street, where the buildings are Greek Revival and Gothic Revival from the 1800s. Old center, new everything else. That is the town in one line.

Prices here move by subdivision, not by town. Two houses a mile apart can be $80,000 apart because one is in a 2003 starter neighborhood and the other is a 2016 build on a bigger lot. So use the town number as a starting line, never as an answer. Here is the starting line. The typical home sale in Plainfield was $402,000 in 2025, up from $375,000 in 2024. Go back and the same measure reads $340,000 in 2023, $311,000 in 2022, $285,000 in 2021, $257,000 in 2020, $250,000 in 2019 and $243,000 in 2018. There were 4,968 sales in the 2023 through 2025 window, which is a lot of real data for a suburb this size.

Where those numbers come from, in plain words. Illinois makes everybody file a sale form at closing, and the state publishes them. I kept only normal sales between strangers, which means I dropped foreclosures, bank-owned sales, sales between relatives, court-ordered sales, and anything under $10,000. Then I took the middle sale price over a rolling three year window, so one strange month cannot swing the line.

Two things about this series you should know, said straight. First, it starts in 2018, not 2013 like my Chicago pages. Illinois only began collecting these sale records electronically outside Cook County around then, and Will County's records begin in January 2018. That is simply where the record begins. Second, this number covers all homes together: houses, condos, townhomes and two-unit buildings, which most of the country calls duplexes and Chicago calls two-flats. Outside Cook County the state does not publish a property class that tells them apart. So read this as the typical home sale price in Plainfield, because that is exactly what it is.

Rent is where a small investor should start, and Plainfield's rent trackers agree with each other more than most. A two bedroom runs roughly $2,230 to $2,400 a month. A three bedroom runs roughly $2,760 to $2,900. One honest note here: these trackers count apartment listings more than single family houses, and their studio and one bedroom numbers swing wildly month to month, which tells you the sample is thin at the small end. The two and three bedroom numbers are the ones I would lean on, and the way around the thin data is easy. Pull five current listings on the block you are buying and average those yourself before you write an offer.

On property taxes I am going to give you the method instead of a number, and tell you why. In Illinois your assessed value is one third of market value. You subtract your exemptions, then multiply by a rate set for your specific tax code. A tax code is just the bundle of districts your address falls in: county, township, village, school, park, library, fire. Two houses in the same town can sit in different tax codes and pay different rates. The Will County Clerk publishes those rates by township every spring, but the tables are hosted on a server I could not read, and I will not print a number I have not seen. Look up your own tax code, and ask the listing agent for the last full tax bill before you make an offer.

There is no Metra station in Plainfield, and there is still a way downtown. The village runs a free Park-n-Ride at 14407 S. Depot Drive with two Pace express buses. Route 755 ends at Union Station. Route 855 ends in the Loop. If you want an actual train, the Route 59 station on the BNSF line in Aurora is a short drive and has 4,424 parking spaces. And the village is early in a funded ten year riverfront plan next to downtown, with trails and overlooks and a paddlecraft launch. Slow, funded, boring improvements next to a house I own are my favorite kind.