I am very impressed with the performance of real estate in my home state of Illinois.  I have lived in some hot real estate markets over the last fifteen years from California to Boston to South Florida and Atlanta.  Things are still booming in some of those markets but interest only mortgages have taken their toll on markets like California's.

I visited Illinois over the recent holidays and I can see the real estate movement there starting to hit with a targeted precision that has been refined in some of the other markets I mentioned.  They are filling in the farm land rapidly with some great developments.

After reading a recent report on Aurora Real Estate, I'm becoming more and more convinced that real estate in Illinois is going to take off.  The safe money is in the immediate burbs around Chicago, but I suspect that those burbs are going to grow down to Peoria and Bloomington and Champagne and Springfield and connect with the burbs moving Northward from St Louis.

It is a very good time to invest in real estate in this particular market.  Things may be tanking in California but California does not drive real estate markets in the Midwest, especially markets supported by Chicago and St Louis, which make especially comforting hedges.