Despite Snow, Waltham Buying and Renting Market Still Strong

Waltham’s resilient real estate market is bowed but unbroken, amid one of the craziest winters in decades.

The first phase of the Merc at Moody & Main, a new apartment project featuring a retro 19th century style façade designed after the old Mercantile building, will open later this year, with the remainder coming online in 2016. Northland Investment Corporation

By Scott Van Voorhis

March 2, 2015

2 minutes to read

Waltham’s resilient real estate market is bowed but unbroken, amid one of the craziest winters in decades.

Sales of both homes and condos are off amid the harsh winter, with few listings for buyers to pick over. There are only 26 homes on the market in the entire city, down from the more typical 60 usually seen in late winter.

But there have definitely been some bright spots, downtown Waltham being one of them.

Though the storms have put a dent on sales in Watch City, condo prices, especially in the city’s increasingly hip downtown, have kept on rising, brokers say. They rose 2.2 percent in January, hitting a median of $359,000, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

“Right now condos are very hot,’’ said Hans Brings, a premiere broker at Coldwell Banker. “People are tired of having to manage a landscape and plow snow.’’

And the few single-family homes that are on the market are moving as well, as buyers brave the weather to check out an open house and possibly land something in a tight market.

Nancy McLaughlin, a Redfin listing specialist for the western suburbs, said one of her best sales of the last few months came from Waltham, when a cape near the Lexington border fetched $510,000 — more than $100,000 over asking.

“Waltham is as hot as a pistol,’’ she said.

Meanwhile, the first phase of a major apartment development taking shape in downtown Waltham is gearing up for its grand opening. The first phase of the Merc at Moody & Main, a new apartment project featuring a retro 19th century style façade designed after the old Mercantile building, will open later this year, with the remainder coming online in 2016.

The Merc, which is a block away from Waltham’s commuter rail station, will put hundreds of new apartments downtown. It follows in the footsteps of the 281-apartment Cronin’s Landing, which took shape 15 years ago at the site of the old Grover Cronin apartment store.

As more renters move to downtown Waltham, some are liking it enough that they decide to stay, boosting condo sales, Brings notes.

Condo sales are also sizzling downtown, with listings in and around Moody Street, downtown Waltham’s “restaurant row,’’ selling for healthy prices, he said.

In side streets off of Moody, in converted two or three-family homes, condos are fetching anywhere from $350,000 and $450,000.

Buyers are often from Boston, where they can get a 1,700 or 2,000 square foot condo for the same price they would have paid in the Hub for 600 square feet.

“They still want to be close to Boston but it’s a little more affordable,’’ Brings said.