What do Brookline, Weston and Wellesley have in common?
It may come as no surprise that besides reputations for stellar schools and their proximity to Boston, those three towns also boast some of the highest home prices in the state. Brookline, Weston and Wellesley have consistently ranked in the top 10 Bay State communities with the priciest single-family homes since 1998.
So have Dover, Lincoln, Chilmark, Nantucket and Boston proper (Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the South End). Concord, Carlisle, Sherborn and Aquinnah also made the top list throughout the last four years – some of them slipping out of the top 10 but still remaining in the top 12 or 13 communities with the most expensive homes.
Local real estate agents familiar with the luxury home market predict that those communities will continue to generate sticker-shocking prices despite the economic slump and the softening real estate market.
One reason frequently cited for the expensive home prices in towns like Brookline and Wellesley is the good school systems that attract higher-income families. Some maintain that it’s the schools – along with proximity to Boston – that keep demand for homes in those communities strong even when the real estate market takes a turn for the worse.
“The good news for Brookline and Newton is that the schools have always bailed us out – good market or bad market,” said James Nemetz, manager of Hammond Residential GMAC’s Chestnut Hill office.
In the late 1980s when the real estate market soured, home prices plummeted as much as 50 to 70 percent in some nearby communities, while home prices in Brookline and Newton experienced more moderate price drops – like 20 to 25 percent, said Nemetz. He attributes that to the schools.
In Brookline, the median price for single-family homes sold through October of this year was $775,000 – a 43.5 percent increase from the $540,000 median price posted in 1998, according to The Warren Group, parent company of Banker & Tradesman.
Today, buyers searching for homes in a town like Brookline aren’t likely to find bargain-basement deals but they will find more for-sale homes to choose from. Higher-end luxury homes are taking longer to sell, and the supply of homes is building up.
“It’s [inventory] certainly higher than it has been in previous years,” said Nemetz. But he also said that this time around he isn’t seeing the speculation that existed in the troubled real estate market of the late 1980s.
Great Reputations
In Carlisle, where the median price of homes sold for the first eight months of this year was $730,000, the high prices are partly driven by new construction, said Judy Moore, 2003 president-elect for the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
A broker with Re/Max Premier Properties in Lexington, Moore said homebuyers choose towns like Carlisle and Lincoln because they can get more land with their home purchases than comparably priced communities like Brookline or Wellesley. The communities are close enough to Boston, but far enough away that they feel rural, and they are generally well-managed towns that have great reputations, she said.
In Carlisle, there is a lot more land available than other communities near Boston, and this has led to an increase in housing construction. But the new homes are expensive because land costs are high. Single-family home prices in Carlisle have skyrocketed 64 percent in the last four years from the median price of $445,000 posted in 1998, according to The Warren Group.
Of the 29 single-family homes currently for sale in Carlisle 13 of them – or about 45 percent – are newly constructed houses. The 14 homes that came under agreement within the last year included six that were priced over $1 million and five of them were newly built homes, said Moore.
In Lincoln, there are 28 single-family homes for sale, including a 17-room newly built home with a four-car garage priced at $3.5 million Of the 48 single-family homes that sold in the last 12 months in Lincoln, 17 of them were over $1 million.
The median price for homes sold in Lincoln from January through August of this year, the most recent month for which statistics are available, was $827,500. That’s 54 percent more than the $537,500 median price posted in 1998.
Home prices in Boston’s Back Bay, Beacon Hill and South End neighborhoods have gone up just as much. The median price for single-family homes sold in Boston during the first seven months of the year was $1.5 million, a 58.7 percent increase from the $945,000 median price of four years ago.
Weston experienced a similar price increase during the last four years. The median price in Weston climbed 58.9 percent to $916,250 for homes sold through August of this year from $576,500.
Wellesley also has seen its prices jump 51 percent from $469,000 in 1998 to $710,000 for homes sold during the first 10 months of 2002.
