For Real Estate, A Giant Spring Clearance Sale

MICHELLE CONLIN

In suburban Chicago, it's paradise to be a homebuyer.

At the Millbrook Pointe development in quaint and pristine Wheeling, a $269,000, brick-and-stone townhouse comes with $25,000 in free upgrades, including wood-burning fireplaces, all-stainless steel kitchens and marbled bathrooms tricked out with double-bowl vanities and whirlpool soaker tubs.

Down the highway at the Patriot Place golf course villas in Bolingbrook, buyers are lavished with lawns sodded to perfection, absurdly low seller financing and a year of free insurance that will pay the mortgage if you lose your job.

At the Sunset Ridge estates, the amenity bonanza gets even more surreal: Buy a customizable colonial for as little as $170,000 and get a brand new, $17,000 Chevy Cruze. The 2011 model. For free.

Spring for home-sellers is like Christmas for retailers — peak season. Normally, that might mean a few giveaways. A better brand of siding here. An expanded choice of tile color there. But a new car? "Obviously, business has been soft," says Kim Meier, president of KLM Homebuilders, the company offering the promotion.

The festival of upgrades on new homes — especially in the housing markets that were savaged by the subprime meltdown — is queasy confirmation of just how much the housing market remains the sickest part of the U.S. economy.

Existing home sales plunged nearly 10 percent in February to their lowest level in nine years. It was the largest drop since July. Forty percent of those sales were on distressed properties. And new home sales are on track to come in at just 250,000 this year, the fewest since the Kennedy administration, when there were 120 million fewer people in the United States.

"What is discouraging in many markets is that it appears as if some of the local builders are creating the volume," says Wayne Yamano, vice president with John Burns Real Estate Consulting.