After a slow year for the residential real estate market in 2023, with persistent high mortgage rates and low inventory keeping buyers and sellers sidelined, industry experts are optimistic for the 2024 local and national markets. For Chicago and statewide, housing market trends in the final three months of 2023 continued to show declines in home sales compared with 2022 — apart from in the month of December when Chicago saw a slight increase — with prices staying elevated year-over-year, according to data from Illinois Realtors, a trade association for real estate agents. Nationally, in Decem…
