Six years ago Rockford routinely made the list of America's most inhospitable cities. In the top 20 shitholes for 2017 and 2018 according to USA Today. And as recently as 2023, Rockford was classified as "one of the most violent cities in America".
Hey, who cares? Millennials need affordable housing and it's relatively cheap to buy his and her firearms.
Rockford Is Now America’s Top Housing Market After an Improbable Turnaround
The Illinois metro area, west of Chicago, was one of nearly a dozen in the Midwest ranking among the top 20
By Libertina Brandt, WSJ
April 25, 2024 5:30 am ET
A decade ago, Rockford, Ill., was the underwater mortgage capital of America. Today, it is the country’s top real-estate market, according to The WSJ/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking.
Rockford attracts home buyers who are drawn to its affordable housing stock and its growing healthcare, aerospace and logistics industries. The Rockford metro area, about 90 miles from Chicago and Milwaukee, offers easy access to its larger neighbors. A direct train line to Chicago is due to open in a few years.
“We are also seeing a huge boom in entrepreneurs who are from here and opening things such as retail stores, small manufacturing companies, gift shops, restaurants and bars,” said Thomas McNamara, the city’s mayor. “Which is what we need. It’s what our community was like in its heyday.”
Those factors helped the city’s housing market emerge from the 2008-09 financial crisis, said McNamara. The median listing price of a home in the Rockford metro area soared to $235,000 in March, up a stunning 51.7% compared with a year ago, which is the largest gain of any metro area in the ranking’s top 20.
Rockford's ranking is due to its blistering housing market, quality of life, which is enhanced by access to parks and a variety of retail, and low climate risk.
Rockford is one of 11 Midwestern metro areas that dominate the top 20 in the latest WSJ/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking. The region’s relative affordability makes it attractive when home prices in much of the U.S. are near record highs. Three of the four top-ranked cities—all in the Midwest—had median home price listings in March below $250,000. That compares with the national median listing price of $424,900, according to Realtor.com.
Another inducement: Homes in the Midwest are usually less vulnerable to natural disasters. Surveys show that wildfires, floods and hurricanes—and exploding insurance costs associated with these events—are a growing concern among home buyers.
In March, there were about 230 active home listings in the Rockford area.
“Areas in the Midwest tend to be less impacted by these risks, giving buyers some peace of mind when taking on a home purchase,” said Hannah Jones, a senior economic analyst for Realtor.com.
Rockford is sometimes referred to as the City of Gardens, thanks to its 7,000 acres of parkland and its numerous public gardens. But much of the social life centers around the Rock River, which divides the city between East and West and is home to a vibrant arts and culture scene.
The city has come a long way since its underwater mortgage days in 2013, when nearly one-third of the metro area’s mortgages were for homes that were worth less than the money owed on them. Today, manufacturing companies in the Rockford region employ more than 20,000 people, according to McNamara. Among the area’s most notable employers are Collins Aerospace and Ingersoll Machine Tools, which opened a new manufacturing and assembly center in 2022.
A diversified manufacturing sector helped the Rockford area recover from the 2008-09 financial crisis.
A shortage of available listings is driving Rockford’s hot housing market, even though the area’s population has barely changed from 2020 levels of around 337,000.
Mackenzie McNally and her partner, Kyle Speck, both 30 years old, started house hunting in Rockford about a year ago. They made around 14 offers over the course of a year—all rejected. Finally in April they closed on a roughly 1,000-square-foot home for $187,500 in Rockford’s Machesney Park neighborhood.
Mackenzie and her partner, Kyle, made around 14 offers before they found their home in April.
“Every house we had bid on we were either losing to all-cash offers or being overbid by $5,000 to $15,000,” McNally said. “The house we got didn’t even go to market.”
The lack of homes for sale in and around Rockford is due to a dearth of new affordable housing and an unwillingness by many owners to list their home and re-enter the buyer’s market at a time of rising interest rates, according to local real-estate agent Ryan Petry.
A normal market in the Rockford metro area has around 1,000 homes for sale, said Dianne Parvin, another Rockford real-estate agent. In March, there were only about 230 active listings.
A lot of starter homes in the Rockford area are ranch style and predate the 1980s. When these homes hit the market within the $100,000 to $250,000 range, they typically receive multiple offers and sell over asking, according to Petry. If they sit on the market, they are likely overpriced or in need of maintenance, he said.
WSJ/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking: Top 20
Families searching for more space in Rockford have been frustrated by lack of choice. Scott Pateros and his wife, Sarah Apple, have been hunting for a bigger home for about two months. The couple, who are in their late 30s, live in a roughly 2,000-square-foot home in the city and would like to stay within the city to keep their two children in the same school district.
Pateros, a stay-at-home dad, and Apple, a lawyer, were looking at homes that were around double the size of their current home and found only three listings that met their requirements. “We put an offer in on one that we didn’t get,” said Pateros. “The other one we ended up not making an offer on because it didn’t feel like a good fit.”
The couple recently made an offer on a roughly 4,000-square-foot home in the city and are negotiating a purchase contract. Pateros declined to comment on the expected closing price but said the home hadn’t hit the market yet when they toured it.
Those who want to downsize aren’t having better luck. Ana Parsons and her husband, Jason Parsons, have been looking for a home in the Rockford metro for three years. The couple, who are in their late 40s, have been living in a two-story, roughly 2,000-square-foot home in Belvidere, a city suburb, for the past 20 years. They want to move to a single-story home in the area with a lot of land.
Ana and Jason Parsons have spent the past three years looking to downsize in the Rockford area.
In 2021, they began looking in the $400,000 to $600,000 range but they haven’t found anything yet. They can’t buy a new home until they sell their current one and the contingency has put them at a disadvantage.
“Most sellers right now will not take contingencies unless their house has been sitting on the market for a long time,” she said. “Which means it’s overpriced.”
The WSJ/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking looked at the 200 largest metro areas in the country and ranked them based on a variety of economic and lifestyle factors, including housing supply, housing demand, property taxes, unemployment and proximity to popular retail and restaurant chains such as Starbucks, Costco and Home Depot.
For the first time, the ranking also looked at the percentage of homes in each market that are at risk of being affected by extreme heat, wind, air quality, flood and wildfire over the next 30 years. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com.)
Write to Libertina Brandt at Libertina.Brandt@wsj.com