[ad_1]
Explore the map below to see how the median single-family home sale price has changed in your town.
What’s behind the trends?
Newly remote workers certainly moved farther out of the city during the pandemic, contributing to price hikes, but that isn’t the full story, said Tom Hopper, director of the Center for Housing Data at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.
Hopper noted investors are increasingly buying up low-cost homes. Closer to Boston, a struggling public transit system has made urban living less desirable, pushing residents out. There’s also been a “meager” growth in housing supply as new home construction hasn’t kept up with demand.
“The lack of new supply combined with competition from investor-purchasers, shifting dynamics in preferences of homebuyers, and slow growth in incomes relative to housing costs is a terrible combination for affordability,” Hopper said in an e-mail. “There are very few parts of the state that are not impacted by our collective failure to meet the Commonwealth’s housing needs.”
Where are home prices rising the most?
Though prices went up substantially all over the state, perhaps no region saw prices rising as consistently fast as Cape Cod, according to the data. Nearly all Cape towns saw price hikes of more than 60 percent over five years. Barnstable, Wellfleet, and Dennis all saw jumps of about 70 percent from 2018 to 2023.
Tiffany Callahan, who has been a realtor on Cape Cod since 2017, has seen the change in the market first hand.
“When I was taking buyers out in 2018, for example. . . I was able to find a well-priced home in a great area in really good condition — and for the most part under $500,000,” she told the Globe.
Now, Callahan said, it’s “really slim pickings.”
“We don’t have a lot of inventory to select. And when we do find something we have to jump quickly, we have to consider how strongly [buyers] offer, and how much over asking in a lot of cases,” she said.
North-central Massachusetts was another pocket of rapid price increases, the data show, with the median home sale price in Fitchburg rising 80 percent from 2018 to 2023. Home prices in nearby Westminster, Gardner, Leominster, and Lunenburg all rose by more than 60 percent.
“What we’ve seen is a change in how people live and work that has over the course of five or six years changed how real estate has been bought and sold in our area,” said Nicholas Pelletier, a realtor in the region and former president of the North Central Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
The pandemic and the flexibility it brought to many workers who formerly commuted every day into Boston changed the buyer pool, Pelletier said. The area has also seen increased investment, factors that “keep feeding into each other.”
What’s happening more recently?
Generally, prices are still climbing in most places, data from 2022 to 2023 show. The median sale price for a single-family home in Greater Boston reached $950,000 in April, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, a record for any month. The real estate group’s figure includes all of Greater Boston except the north and south shores.
But drilling down more specifically, there are some signs of prices leveling off. Several towns inside 128 had slight dips in median sale prices from 2022 to 2023, including Belmont (7 percent) and Medford (3 percent). Most towns, however, saw increases of about 5 to 15 percent over a single year, data show.
In the north-central part of the state and on the Cape, agents said the higher interest rates have contributed to prices leveling off. But demand remains.
“We’ve held really steady with the demand in the area,” Pelletier said.
Christina Prignano can be reached at christina.prignano@globe.com. Follow her @cprignano. Andrew Nguyen can be reached at andrew.nguyen@globe.com. Follow him @onlyandrewn
[ad_2]
This article was originally published by a www.bostonglobe.com . Read the Original article here. .