When we first moved to Illinois, we decided to throw our money away for a year by renting a house. We didn't know the area and didn't want to take a chance with buying property in a neighborhood we knew nothing about.
We ended up in Hainesville and actually liked the neighborhood very much, so we decided to stay and bought a house a couple blocks down the road. I think the timing was almost perfect with the market going down. The market is still going down as I've seen other houses we've looked at over the past month gradually dropping in price, but it's bound to bounce back here in the next few months. This house we actually looked at early on and walked away from it because it was just "too big". But after looking at a few other houses in the Grayslake and Hainesville area, we found them all to be within the same price range regardless of size, so we came back to this one.
Closing is on July 31st. Then the wonderful process of moving begins. It may only be two and a half blocks down the road, but I still don't look forward to the process.