Crain’s quoted numbers from Moody’s Analytics saying that the Chicago-area economy should grow by about 1.6 percent in the first half of 2012 and by about 2 percent for the full year. These numbers sound positive until you consider that six months ago Moody’s predicted that the Chicago-area economy would grow by about 4 percent in 2012.

Crain’s points to the economic uncertainty caused by unstable financial markets and European debt worries. This, the story says, has made employers overly cautious when making new job hires.

Because of this, Moody’s is predicting that the unemployment rate in the Chicago area will jump to 11.4 percent in the first half of 2012. That’s up from 10.6 percent in the second half of 2011. Six months ago, Moody’s predicted that the Chicago-area unemployment rate would stand at 9.2 percent in the first half of 2012.

This is bad news, too, for the Chicago housing market. Buyers won’t be as willing to invest in a new home if they’re still worried about losing their jobs. And as Moody’s numbers show, Chicagoans have little reason to be optimistic about the safety of their jobs.

Just because a new year has started, it doesn’t mean that Chicago, and the rest of the nation, don’t still face serious challenges. Until unemployment finally falls, expect the Chicago housing market to struggle.

This latest news points out once again how important it is for home sellers to work with a skilled REALTOR® to set the right price for their condominiums or single-family homes. Buyers today are smart; they won’t overpay for a home. Those sellers who do set an unrealistic asking price will see their residence sit on the market for months, ignored by today’s savvy home buyers.

First, the prices: According to the latest findings from the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, home prices in the Chicago area dropped 0.8 percent in September when compared to August. They were also down 5 percent when compared to September of 2010.

Prices in the Chicago area today are at levels the area last saw in the spring of 2002, according to the Tribune story.

The “better” news? The Tribune also reported on the latest numbers from CoreLogic that showed that 24.9 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage in the Chicago area owed more on their loans than what their residences were worth at the end of September.

That number isn’t great. But it is better than the 25.2 percent of homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage loans at the end of the second quarter of this year.

Still, even with that slight improvement, 383,625 residences in the Chicago area were underwater on their mortgage loans at the end of September. Obviously, that number is far too high, especially considering nationally that only 22.1 percent of all residential properties with mortgage loans were underwater at the end of the same month, according to CoreLogic.

Both sets of numbers show that the housing market in Chicago, as in the rest of the nation, has a long way to go before it can be considered healthy again. The good news is for buyers: Home prices in the City, even in traditionally attractive neighborhoods such as Lakeview, Lincoln Park and Lincoln Square, remain affordable. Buyers today can find great bargains on good properties in the best locations.

And, increasingly, they want green homes.

This search for environmentally friendly homes is finally getting a bit easier. CLTV’s Web site recently ran a story on the changes being made by Chicago’s MRED, a local multiple listing service of homes for sale.

Late last year, the MRED listing service gave REALTORS® the ability to add nearly two dozen green or energy efficient features with their property listings. According to the CLTV story, these features can include anything from drought-resistant landscaping to low-flow plumbing fixtures to bamboo flooring.

This is good news for Chicago buyers who are looking for green features. They can now find these environmentally friendly amenities listed prominently on many of the home listings they view online.

This move is something that officials from the National Association of REALORS® are happy to see. The CLTV story says that they’d like to see all the nation’s multiple listing services do this. Currently, according to one association official quoted in the story, from 30 to 40 of the services allow their REALTORS® to enter green and energy efficiency data in their home listings. That’s not a lot of services when you consider how many dot the country.

I don’t think it will be much longer, though, before we see an increase in green information on home listings. The reason is a simple one: It’s something more buyers are looking for.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that environmentally friendly features will trump price, location and construction quality. But a growing number of my clients are interested in living in homes that are environmentally friendly. If they’re looking at two houses that are mostly equal, these clients will go with the home that boasts the greener features.

Here’s some advice to the sellers out there: If your home does have some nice green features, advertise them prominently. In today’s tough residential real estate market, sellers need every advantage that they can get. Green features are just one more tool they can use to help move their homes.

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Dennis Rodkin, the writer of Chicago Magazine’s Deal Estate column, tackled this issue last week. He wrote that the idea is gaining popularity among condo owners who are hoping to trim at least some of the costs associated with paying the mortgage on units they no longer want to own.

Rodkin cites a spokesperson from HomeAway, an online vacation-home rental company, who told him that the service had 120 listings in Chicago in April. That’s up 53 percent from the same month one year earlier. More importantly, the spokesperson mentioned that more than half of these vacation-home listings were city condos.

For vacationers, this is good news. Spending a week in a Chicago condo in Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square or just about any other hot city neighborhood makes for a great vacation. It’s a benefit for the owners of these units, too. They may not be able to sell their Chicago condos; but there’s no reason why they can’t at least collect a nice chunk of rent during the prime summer vacation months.

Unfortunately, not everyone is happy about this. Some condo residents worry that the increasing number of rentals will turn their buildings into party zones.  Rodkin reports that the Chicago City Council’s Joint Committee on Zoning License is considering a new nightly vacation rental ordinance. If approved, the measure would force condo owners to pay licensing and inspection fees when they rent out their condos. The ordinance would also force them to pay taxes on their rental proceeds.

I understand the concerns of condo owners, but this ordinance does seem more than anything like a way for the city to squeeze even more money out of its residents. If this measure passes, I wonder, will it put a serious crimp in the short-term rental plans of Chicago condo owners?

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According to the Tribune story, the number of unmarried single buyers has been on the rise since the Chicago housing market first began booming about seven years ago. Since then, there have been twice as many single female buyers as there have been single males.

The Tribune cites data from the National Association of REALTORS® that says that for the fiscal year ended in June, single buyers accounted for 38 percent of all home purchases in the Chicago area. And single women accounted for 26 percent of these sales.

In Chicago itself, not counting the suburbs, 44 percent of buyers for the 12 months ended in June were single, the REALTORS® association data said. Single females accounted for 29 percent of the condominium and single-family home sales in Chicago during the 12-month period.

That’s higher than the national average, where single women accounted for 21 percent of all home purchases. Nationally, single men accounted for just 10 percent of home sales.

These numbers don’t surprise me. After all, Chicago is a great place for singles of any gender to live. Every neighborhood in the city boasts its own character, and the trendiest, places like Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, and Lakeview are alive with high-end restaurants, independent theaters, hip shops and busy nightspots.

At the same time, housing in Chicago’s top neighborhoods is affordable today. The city’s average median sales price is down from last year, and down even more significantly from where it stood just three years ago. This means that single buyers suddenly have more sales power. Many of them can also take advantage (for the time being, at least) of the federal government’s first-time homebuyer tax credit of $8,000.

No, the fact that Chicago is attracting single buyers doesn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I’d be more surprised if the number of single buyers went down.

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A local real estate company reported that distressed properties accounted for at least 34 percent of home sales reported in the Chicago area in 2009.

This continues a trend that started in late 2007. And it’s not one unique to Chicago. As the nation’s economy began to falter, a growing number of homeowners lost their jobs or saw their annual incomes plummet. Many of these homeowners suddenly began struggling to make their mortgage payments for the first time in their lives.

In 2009, U.S. households received 2.8 million foreclosure filings, according to online real estate data company RealtyTrac. This figure represents an all-time high for the country.

It’s little surprise, then, that so many of the Chicago area’s housing sales last year were of foreclosed and distressed properties. Fortunately, there is help for homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgage bills. The federal government in 2009 launched its Home Affordable Modification Program, which provides financial incentives to encourage mortgage lenders and banks to somehow lower the monthly mortgage payments of struggling homeowners.

If you are having difficulty making your mortgage payments, call your mortgage lender immediately. Even if your lender isn’t participating in the federal program, it might still be willing to modify your mortgage loan. After all, your lender does not benefit from seeing you lose your home to foreclosure.

I’m glad that home sales seem to be rising steadily these days. But I’ll be even happier when a much smaller percentage of these sales comes from distressed properties.

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This didn’t change in November, according to the latest data released by the Illinois Association of REALTORS®. But in a bit of a silver lining, sales prices didn’t fall by all that much in the month.

The REALTORS® association reported that the median housing price in the city of Chicago for condominiums, single-family homes and townhomes stood at $215,000. That’s down 3.4 percent from the median sales price of $222,500 in the city one year earlier.

This isn’t the best of news for Chicago home sellers. After all, they’re trying to get the best prices for their homes. But the fact that the median sales price was down less than 4 percent is a good sign for the health of the local housing market.

The numbers tell me that housing prices in Chicago are finally reaching a stable point. Let’s face it, local home prices soared too high here during the height of the residential housing boom that ended in mid- to late-2006. These prices needed to fall. Of course, the process has been painful for home sellers and homeowners alike. Sellers are no longer able to name their price and then watch as buyers fight over their property. Owners are watching helplessly as their condos and single-family homes, even those in neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Lincoln Square, lose value. In fact, some studies suggest that about 15 million U.S. homeowners owe more on their mortgage loans than what their homes are worth.

But as painful as the process has been, it is an important one. There will come a day soon – hopefully in the coming year – when housing prices are no longer lower today than they were a year or two years ago. When that day arrives, we’ll know that housing prices have finally reached equilibrium.

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That’s why the president and his administration worked together to create the Making Home Affordable program. The program encourages mortgage lenders, through financial incentives, to work with homeowners to keep them from losing their residences to foreclosure. Lenders will often modify the mortgage loans of homeowners who are struggling to make their payments each month. Modification may entail lowering the loan’s interest rate, stretching out its term or simply lowering the amount of principal owed. In each case, the homeowner’s monthly mortgage payment would go down.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, about 36,000 local homeowners have received some type of permanent or temporary loan modification as of the end of November. This ranks the Chicago area as one of the busiest sites of Obama’s loan-modification program goes.

Not everyone’s happy with the Obama program, though. Many critics point out that the program hasn’t been helping homeowners as quickly as the government pointed out. Many banks participating in the program haven’t modified nearly as many loans as government officials were hoping.

This is to be expected with any new program as complex as the loan-modification plan. Hopefully, the kinks will be worked out and more homeowners, in Chicago and nationally, will modify their mortgage loans. This is far better than letting these homeowners lose their homes to foreclosure.

And if the government doesn’t step in, that’s what will happen. A new report from First American CoreLogic proves it: This report, issued earlier this month, said that 9.41 percent of mortgage loans in the Chicago area were 90 days or more delinquent in October. This same rate stood at 5.02 percent just one year earlier.

I know many of you aren’t happy that the government is helping struggling homeowners. Yes, some of these homeowners did stretch themselves financially to get into homes that they could not afford. But many more are facing foreclosure because they lost their jobs or suffered a serious illness. This economic slump has shown us how easy it is to have the financial rug pulled out from under you. Simply put, I support any measure that slows the rate of housing foreclosures and in turn, help the market recover.  This recovery benefits everybody in much the same way that foreclosure are a detriment to everybody.

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How much, though, do these shows teach us about Chicago’s housing market? Not much. They may be called “reality” shows, but there isn’t much realistic about it.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Ellen Podmolik wrote about a local couple and real estate agent who will be featured on HGTV’s House Hunters on Dec. 10. In her column, Podmolik writes that both the agent and homebuyers soon discovered that there was precious little reality in the “reality” TV show.

The premise of House Hunters is that buyers look at three homes and then pick the one that they like best. There’s supposed to be some drama, too, in waiting to see if the couple actually qualifies for and gets the residence of their dreams.

Not surprisingly, as Podmolik writes, most of this drama is fake. For instance, in the episode airing this week, the couple looks at three residences in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. But the buyers had made up their minds on what home they were going to buy before the episode filmed. Of the three homes they looked at, one was already under contract to another buyer.

In the story, the agent working with the couple said that House Hunters doesn’t really teach viewers anything about what buying a home is really all about. I can vouch for that. For one thing, most buyers will look at far more than three houses or condominiums before finding the residence that’s right for them.

There is one important lesson, though, that shows like House Hunters can teach viewers: These shows do a good job cluing viewers in on how much residential real estate typically costs in a given neighborhood. For the House Hunters show airing this week, the three homes that the buyers looked at in Lakeview cost from $355,000 to $415,000. It’s an accurate representation of what these types of attached, single-family housing cost in this neighborhood.

Next time you’re watching one of the cable home shows, remember that not everything you’re seeing is real. Remember, too, that this is a good thing: Do you want to watch buyers look at 15 to 20 houses before making a decision? Didn’t think so.

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The association reported that the sales of existing condominiums, single-family homes and townhomes jumped an impressive 28.5 percent in the city of Chicago this October when compared to the same month one year earlier.

The city saw 2,012 home sales in October this year. That’s a significant increase from the 1,566 home sales in Chicago one year earlier.

The entire state of Illinois had a good October, according to the REALTORS® association. The association reported that existing home sales rose 24.2 percent statewide during the month. This means that 10,986 homes were sold in Illinois this October, compared to 8,846 last year during the same month.

These are good numbers. And they’re further proof that the residential real estate market is healing.

What has caused the surge in housing sales in Chicago and the state? Officials with the REALTORS® association point to two factors: pent-up demand and the federal government’s first-time homebuyer tax credit.

Buyers have been waiting on the sidelines for a long time now. It stands to reason that they’d eventually jump back into the market, especially as sellers continue to lower their asking prices. Don’t forget, many sellers are also willing to negotiate on everything from sales price to closing dates. That has made this a great market for buyers.

The federal government’s $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit has encouraged many new buyers to enter the market. Congress only helped matters late last year when it not only extended the first-time buyer credit but created a new $6,500 tax credit for move-up buyers.

To me, the Illinois Association of REALTORS® numbers are an early holiday gift. They’re also a sign that the Chicago housing market – which, remember, is outperforming the state of Illinois as a whole – remains an especially good one for buyers.