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The statewide housing market is entering the spring with one of the biggest surges in for-sale inventory in recent memory.
Data from Realtor.com shows 7,644 active residential listings – a statistic that combines listings for single-family homes, townhouses and condominiums – statewide in the month of March. That’s the biggest haul of active listings since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival froze buyer activity. Prior to COVID, the listing portal’s data shows the combined tally of all residential listings typically hovered between 12,000 and around 14,000 in March.
Banker & Tradesman dug into the phenomena in its Sunday cover story. Real estate industry experts said the rough winter weather suppressed both buyer and seller activity, suggesting that these delayed listings and purchases might fuel a particularly busy spring.
The Realtor.com data also shows the state experienced its biggest bump in new residential listings of all types last month, suggesting the March inventory surge isn’t being driven by a build-up of homes sitting on the market, unsold, even though Redfin data shows around 4 in 10 homes for sale in Greater Boston have been on the market for over 60 days, making them “stale,” the highest share since at least 2022.
Statewide, 7,046 new residential listings hit the market, nearly 1,000 more than March 2025’s tally and nearly as many hit the market in June 2023. It’s the largest number of new listings to arrive in the month of March since 2022, when 9,220 homes came up for sale amid the last burst of the frenzied pandemic housing market.
The biggest concern, industry experts told B&T’s Sam Lattof in Sunday’s cover story, was the direction mortgage interest rates take this spring. While they ended February just a hair below 6 percent – often cited as the magic number to get sellers and buyers off the sidelines – they’ve since surged to almost 6.5 percent.
Data from Zillow showed the impact of the falling mortgage interest rates in February, before the rate surge tied to the Iran war and concerns about inflation and economic difficulties. That listings portal’s calculations showed the median family income needed to afford the median-priced home in Greater Boston fell from $189,572 in February 2025 to $181,011 in February 2026. For the Worcester metro, that figure fell from $126,996 to $121,519 over the same time period.
