Downtown Chicago Condo sales sink to negative 250 units in fourth quarter

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

It sounds like a bad joke, but it's true: The downtown residential market is so awful, it's shrinking.

Last year, the number of new condominiums slated downtown declined by almost 3,000 units. And in the fourth quarter, the number of residential sales was a negative 250 units.

How can that be?

The numbers are drawn from an annual survey that Appraisal Research Counselors reported Tuesday. They are the worst results anybody can recall for the reports, which the company has compiled in quarterly updates since 1997.

Gail Lissner, vice president at Appraisal Research, said the residential inventory fell as developers scrapped projects they would have delivered in a couple of years. The sales figures went negative in late 2008, she said, because buyers began canceling contracts and some developers were caught fudging sales data from earlier in the year.

Negative 250.The struggles of Blue America.