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Even as rising home prices and interest rates pushed many out of the housing market last month, several indicators show competition for the few remaining homes for sale in Central Massachusetts and Greater Boston was even more fierce than last spring.
Year-to-date, there have been 9,711 single-family home sales in Massachusetts, a 9.7 percent decrease from the first three months of 2021 according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. Meanwhile, the year-to-date median single-family home price increased 10.9 percent on the same basis to $499,000.
Redfin reported that a full 79 percent of offers its agents wrote on in Greater Boston in March met with at least one competing offer, up from 77.3 percent in February and 72.6 percent in March 2021. That made Boston the second-most competitive market in the nation by Redfin’s estimate, just behind San Jose, California.
And that’s not all. Boston was followed by Providence, Rhode Island (78.3 percent of offers saw competition) and Worcester (78.2 percent of offers) in the third- and fourth-most competitive slots.
Worcester, in particular, saw a decline in competitiveness by Redfin’s estimate: 81.8 percent of offers its agents submitted in February met with competition, as did 83.7 percent of offers submitted in March 2021.
These figures largely match up with data reported by the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. Two measures of market competitiveness – the average ratio of sale price to offer price and average number of days until a home went under agreement – both ticked upwards in March.
Among single-family properties in GBAR’s territory in MetroWest and within Route 128, listings took only 12 days to leave the market in March, compared to 14 in February and 14 in March 2021. And the prevalence of bidding wars gave single-family sellers 106.1 percent of their asking price on average last month, up from 103 percent in February and 102.4 percent in March 2021.
Condominium listings, GBAR said, took an average of 16 days to leave the market last month, down from 17 in February and 20 last March. Condo sellers got, on average, 101.9 percent of their asking price, up from 99.4 percent in February and 98.9 percent in March 2021.
Greater Boston only had 1,036 active single-family and 1,671 active condo listings in March, for 1.4 months’ supply of single-families and 1.9 months’ supply of condos. The situation has caused GBAR’s 2022 president to warn of the potential for the entry-level portion of the region’s housing market to “stall.”
