What's actually happening, written down.

Every market update — from a TikTok, a newsletter, or a listing agent trying to win your business — comes down to three numbers. Learn to read them yourself and you'll never have to take anyone's word for what's "really happening."

• Months of supply. How long it would take to sell every home currently listed at the current sales pace. Under ~3 months is a seller's market. Over ~6 is a buyer's market. Everything between is negotiable, which is where most of Chicago sits most years.
• Days on market (DOM), trending. Not the number itself — the direction. A neighborhood where DOM is climbing month over month is softening even if prices haven't dropped yet. Prices are a lagging indicator; DOM moves first.
• Price-per-square-foot trend, not median price. Median price swings with whatever happened to sell that month — one $2M teardown sale skews a whole neighborhood's median. Price/sqft on comparable homes is a cleaner read.

What this means in practice: if someone tells you "the market is crazy right now" without one of these three numbers attached, they're describing a feeling, not a market. Ask for the number. If they don't have it, get a second opinion — ideally from someone who pulls this data before every listing appointment, not just before a TikTok.

This shows up constantly in real estate, and it's the same principle behind the Anchor tools in the MixMatch training app: the first number spoken in a negotiation becomes the reference point for every number that follows, whether or not it was a good number.

In a home sale, this cuts both ways:

• As a seller, your list price is your anchor. It's not "what I hope to get" — it's the number every buyer's offer gets measured against. A list price with no strategy behind it is a wasted anchor.
• As a buyer, if an agent or seller asks "what were you thinking of offering?" before they've shown their hand, that's a request for you to anchor for them. A calibrated response — "What does the data say this is worth?" — puts the burden of justifying the number back where it belongs.

The tactic isn't about being cagey for its own sake. It's about making sure the number that anchors the negotiation is the one backed by evidence — comps, condition, market trend — not just whoever spoke first out of nerves.

West Loop gets sold as a restaurant district first and a neighborhood second. Fair — Randolph Street's restaurant row is real. But the people who actually live here are buying it for three quieter reasons: walkability to the Loop and Fulton Market offices, a genuinely dense stock of converted lofts and new infill construction side by side, and a street grid that still has room for the kind of large, quiet-material minimalist builds that don't fit on the North Side's older, narrower lots.

That last point is why it's where the current Minimalist Loft build sits — a 3,400 sqft ICF-and-triple-pane build on a West Loop lot, currently in pre-build with demo permits issued (see the Communities section on the homepage). Lots this size, this close to downtown, are the exception here, not the rule.

If you're buying a converted loft instead of building new, the one thing worth checking before anything else is the building's original use and conversion date — timber-loft conversions from the 1990s and true new-construction "loft-style" buildings from the 2010s+ have very different mechanical systems, and it changes what an inspection should focus on.