Real estate market thawed quickly after winter

Pending sales soared 30 percent in April compared to the same month last year.

Louis Berms/AP

May 19, 2015

1 minute to read

The spring market is off to one of its fastest starts in years as buyers cooped up over the miserable winter are jamming open houses and bidding up new listings.

Pending sales soared 30 percent in April compared to the same month last spring — 6,428 homes were put under agreement compared to 4,940 last April, reports the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, the median price of a single-family home also rose 2.4 percent to $327,000, the real estate group reported.

“As far as buyers were concerned, the winter officially ended in April as the high number of accepted offers pushed the spring market up to full speed very quickly,’’ said 2015 MAR President Corinne Fitzgerald, broker/owner of FITZGERALD Real Estate in Greenfield, in a statement.

Pending condo sales were also up markedly, rising more than 24 percent to 2,761, though the median price fell 4.5 percent to $304,700, MAR said.

The fast start to the spring market after a difficult February and March has real estate agents looking up as well.

The Realtor market confidence index shot up 23 percent in April to 82.28. The scale runs from 0 to 100, with anything over 50 indicating a strong or rising market and anything below that midpoint signaling weakening conditions.

The Realtor price index rose to 80.66, its fourth highest rating, according to MAR.

One down note, though, has been the relative scarcity of homes for sale compared with buyer demand, with the number of listings on the market down 24 percent through the end of March compared to last spring.

“Hopefully this buyer enthusiasm will encourage homeowners to sell and home builders to build to meet current and future demand,’’ Fitzgerald said.