Home Buying

Report: February Pending Home Sales Rose, Despite Weather

A series of freakish winter storms may have left much of the Bay State looking like the Alaskan frontier, but home buyers apparently strapped on their snow shoes to go house hunting.

March 10, 2015

1 minute to read

A series of freakish winter storms may have left much of the Bay State looking like the Alaskan frontier, but home buyers apparently strapped on their snow shoes to go house hunting.

Pending sales actually rose 2.6 percent in February across the state compared to the same time last year, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors (MAR) finds. The survey tracks preliminary purchase and sales agreements for homes.

The median price of homes put under agreement in Massachusetts also rose during the arctic cold and snow of last month, jumping 7.6 percent to $317,500, up from $295,000 in February 2014, according to the Realtors group.

The only weak spot were condos, which saw pending sales fall 6 percent even as prices edged up slightly to a median of $287,000.

“This just goes to show that people want to buy,’’ 2015 MAR President Corinne Fitzgerald, broker owner of FITZGERALD Real Estate in Greenfield, said in a statement.

That said, the snow did have an impact on both buyers and sellers – it just didn’t cripple the market like some feared.

Roughly 40 percent of real estate agents polled by MAR reported that all or most of their clients kept on going to open houses and making offers, despite the treacherous weather. Another 19 percent of agents said roughly half their buyers kept in the game.

By contrast, just 3.6 percent of agents surveyed said all of their buyers had decided to go into hibernation until spring, though another 33 percent said most, though not all, of their buyers had dropped out.

Sellers, surprisingly, proved even hardier. Just less than half of all agents surveyed said either all or most of their sellers either kept their homes on the market or went ahead with plans to list their homes, according to MAR.

Just 1.8 percent of agents said all of their sellers decided to call it quits, with another 15 percent saying most of their sellers had decided to wait until warmer weather to move ahead with their sales plans.

“Snow or no snow, it’s quite possible that the numbers would have been even higher if there were more homes for sale in February,’’ Fitzgerald said.