Why it’s so hard to buy a home in Massachusetts right now
Massachusetts home buyers not only have sky-high prices to contend with, but the fewest listings to pick from in more than a decade.
Sales were up again May, and the number of single-family homes changing hands has jumped by more than 28 percent through the first five months of the year, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.
However, the combination of soaring buyer demand and a decades-long drought in new construction of single-family homes in the suburbs has led to a steady and dramatic drop in the number of properties available for sale.
The number of homes for sale plunged 27 percent in May compared to the same month last year, The Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports.
And the 17,120 home on the market in May were the fewest since May 2004, near the peak of the last boom, when buyers had 16,807 listings to choose from, the realtors group reports.
That earlier bottleneck helped push prices to record highs over the course of 2005 and 2006, enabled in no small part by the profusion of subprime mortgages that let buyers stretch beyond their means.
“We need to encourage hesitant sellers to add to the inventory by listing their home in order to keep the market moving and prices from going too high,” said 2016 MAR President Annie Blatz, branch executive at Kinlin Grover Real Estate in Brewster.
Overall, the median price of a home in Massachusetts rose 3.8 percent in May, to $353,000, according to MAR. The median home price in Suffolk County, of which Boston is by far the largest part, hit $420,000 after a 3.6 percent rise, Warren Group stats show.
Months of supply – or the amount of time it to sell all the homes currently on the market – fell 40 percent, to 3.4 months.
Days on market, which is also tied closely to the number of homes for sale, fell 11.3 percent, to 90 days
By comparison, home buyers in other years have had double the number of homes to pick from.
Buyers back in May, 2006, had 36,696 homes to choose from and 31,128 in May 2011.
The number of homes for sale has been on the decline since then, dropping steadily from 2011 on, stats show.
“Buyers snatched up homes as soon as they came on the market in the spring and once again pushed closed sales up,” Blatz said in a press release.
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