| Is November’s double-digit drop in single-family home sales the start of something bigger?
The latest monthly sales figures from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, show the number of single-family homes sold statewide dropped 11.9 percent compared to November 2018. It’s the biggest such drop since November 2010.
Broken down by county, most of the statewide 625-house drop in sales can be chalked up to drops of more than 20 percent in Barnstable and Norfolk counties, a 14.9 percent drop in Essex County and a 9.8 percent drop in Middlesex County.
But while these numbers may seem sudden and scary, they don’t seem to be a sign of some pending recession, with the state and national economies still going strong and no clear sign of consumer sentiment taking a nosedive.
Indeed, experts now say the biggest threat to the local economy is, in fact, the possibility that we could run out of workers to staff our expanding companies, because housing costs are too high for some who would otherwise love to move here.
Instead of a recession, these sales figures are likely a bad case of the same disease that’s been afflicting Massachusetts for some time now.
At the same time the number of sales dipped in November, the monthly median sale price rose slightly, to $390,000, and the year-to-date median sale price rose even more, from $385,000 last November to $400,000 this year.
With similar jumps in the worst-hit counties – a 1.8 percent increase in monthly median sale price in Barnstable County, 3.5 percent in Essex, 2.9 percent in Middlesex and 4.3 percent in Norfolk – it’s reasonable to assume this is merely another consequence of our high home prices. The higher prices get, the fewer people think they can afford to buy their next home. The more homeowners think like that, the fewer homes hit the market. The fewer homes hit the market, the more buyers scramble for what’s still out there, in a vicious cycle.
And at the rate medical science advances, it will likely be a decade or more before a “silver tsunami” of aging home sellers starts to hit.
As legislators sit ready to take up Gov. Charlie Baker’s “housing choice” bill, they would do well to keep these figures in mind.
The bill, which would lower the threshold for housing-related zoning changes to pass local planning and select boards from the current two-thirds majority to a simple majority, would help reduce the number of projects and locally-led rezoning plans that fall victim to NIMBY neighbors.
Make no mistake: Both for the sake of our economy and for the sake of generational justice, the state needs much more housing produced. Baker’s bill offers our best step forward right now.
Letters to the editor of 100 words or less may be submitted via email at editorial@thewarrengroup.com with the subject line “Letter to the Editor,” or mailed to the offices of The Warren Group. Submission is not a guarantee of publication.
