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The Greater Boston and Greater Worcester housing markets have cooled considerably in the last 12 months, but by at least one measure, didn’t cool that much between July and August.
Redfin’s monthly survey of competition for home listings shows both metros saw only slight declines in the share of offers its agents wrote that met with at least one competing offer.
Boston registered as the nation’s fourth-most competitive market with 54 percent of Redfin offers meeting competition last month. That put it just behind Providence (54.5 percent), San Jose, California (58 percent) and Philadelphia (61.7 percent). The metro is down from 55.2 percent in July and 68.7 percent in August 2021.
Worcester wasn’t far behind Boston, at eighth place nation-wide. All told, 51.2 percent of Redfin-written offers met with competition last month, compared to 54.3 percent in July and 65.3 percent in August 2021.
Many of the metros at that saw the greatest decline in multiple-offer situations were located in the Sun Belt, with North Carolina markets Raleigh and Charlotte taking first and third place in that ranking.
Nationwide, 44.6 percent of home offers written by Redfin agents faced competition in August, the company said. It’s the lowest such figure since the start of the pandemic when real estate markets nation-wide slowed to a crawl. The figure is down from 63.5% a year earlier and a revised rate of 47.2% in July, making it the seventh straight month of declines.
Thanks to the properties’ typically-lower cost, offers for townhouses were more likely than other property types to encounter competition, with 44.1 percent of Redfin offers facing competition for them, the company said. They were followed by single-family homes (42.1 percent), multifamily properties (40.2 percent) and condominiums (37 percent).
Citing reports from the company’s agents, Redfin’s analysis placed the blame on the nation-wide cooldown on the doubling of mortgage rates since this time in 2021, which have added roughly $500 to the monthly mortgage payment for a $400,000 home.
