The Boston Marathon runs through some of the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts. iStock photo
The Boston Marathon’s route, which stretches from the outer suburbs to downtown Boston, isn’t paved in gold – at least not yet.
But median home prices along the legendary 26.2-mile course from Hopkinton to the Back Bay have exploded over the past 15 years, numbers from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, show.
And despite a down spring market that has seen a softening in price growth, it is a trend that is here to stay, part of a larger shift over the past half century in the local economy from manufacturing and other traditional industries to knowledge-based sectors like biotech and high-tech.
The biggest changes – and price increases over the years – can be found just as you start to reach the halfway mark of the Marathon route, starting in Natick and ending in Copley Square.
If there is a “Gold Coast” of the Greater Boston real estate market, this is increasingly it.
“It can truly be said that there’s been little heartbreak for homeowners in the communities along the Marathon route,” said David Crowley, vice president at One Boston Luxury Living/William Raveis Boston. “It’s often said the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location, and that route has definitely been lined with gold.”
Blue-Collar to Gold Coast
Let’s start with Natick, a traditionally blue-collar town that is increasingly going uptown as buyers get priced out of nearby fellow Marathon route suburbs of Wellesley and Newton.
The median home price in Natick stood at $730,000 at the end of March, up slightly from the same period last year, and a big jump from early 2009, when it weighed in at $430,000.
But that’s chump change compared to the kind of increases seen in the second half of the Marathon route, and in Wellesley, Newton and Brookline in particular.
We are talking about a doubling of prices since the economy began to climb out of the Great Recession in early 2009.
Wellesley, the halfway point for Marathon runners, saw its median single-family home sale price hit $1.9 million in early 2022. And while it has since fallen back to $1.85 million, Wellesley’s median price is still up roughly 85 percent from where it was in mid-2009, when it had just crossed the $1 million mark.
Meanwhile, Newton has seen its median price practically double, settling out at $1.45 million at the end of March, compared to $710,000 during the spring of 2009, while Brookline’s median price has more than doubled. It now stands at $2.3 million, compared to $1.17 million in 2009.
And you can forget about downtown Boston and the Back Bay. The median condominium price there is now close to $1 million, up from $509,000 in 2009, while the median single-family price is $3.2 million, up from $1.4 million 14 years ago.
Of course, once-sleepy towns like Hopkinton, where the Marathon’s starting line is to be found, and Ashland, the second town on runners’ road into Boston, have seen the value of their homes increase as well, even if not quite as dramatically.
Hopkinton’s median price was $670,000 at the end of March, down significantly from $775,000 last year, but up quite a bit from $475,000 in 2009.
Ashland’s median price, by contrast, doubled over the past 15 years, coming in at $715,000 this spring, up from $261,000 in the spring of 2009.
No Sign of Stopping
Greater Boston has seen a seismic shift over the past 40 to 50 years, as the region has been catapulted from decaying backwater to global economic hub.
Scott Van Voorhis
By 2009, many of those trends were already well along, even before the burgeoning software and life sciences sectors took off.
They proceeded to do just that over the next decade and a half, all the while pushing up prices across this housing-starved region.
“Greater Boston is a very different place today,” Crowley recalled, noting when he went to grad school in Houston in the 1980s, he was impressed with the contrast of the busting Texas city with a Boston he described as “moribund.”
“Fortunately, everything began to change in the ’80’s and, for the most part, Boston has been a fairly upward trajectory ever since,” Crowley said.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
