The next time you’re walking around the neighborhood and see a pedestrian bent over, hands on knees, gasping for air, look twice. It might not be a jogger training for next year’s Boston marathon – it might just be a real estate agent trying to catch their breath after the wild spring home sales market.

“Seven of my own [recent] listings – five of them sold within 24 hours of being listed. Four of them had multiple offers, and several went over asking price. That hasn’t happened in probably six years,” said Bob Imperato, president of Boston Realty Associates. “It’s not all across state lines, but in Brighton, Newton, Jamaica Plain, Cambridge, all those areas – it’s been a remarkable spring. When you start to see the closed figures, you’re going to see some remarkable numbers.”

Year-to-date sales through April are up more than 18 percent over last year, according to data obtained from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. But even those figures don’t quite show the rapid shift in the market.

A sampling of data from metro Boston and beyond shows houses selling quicker and closer to their asking prices – signs of the bidding wars being sparked in some towns.

Minutes On Market

Banker & Tradesman examined a sampling of MLS PIN single-family home sales data from 15 different towns in counties with rising sales and found that days on market had dropped more than three weeks on average over the past two months compared to the same time last year, while sales prices were creeping closer to list prices. At this time last year, sales prices were coming in from 1.4 percent to 7.7 percent below list prices in the sample; this spring, that gap shrunk to 0.4 percent to 5.1 percent.

“We have four to five times more buyers in the market then we had at this time last year,” said Sam Schneiderman, president of the Massachusetts Association of Buyer Agents (MABA). “But we don’t have the inventory to support that volume of buyers. The pent-up demand has just unleashed.”

But after all the months of lousy news about the housing market, it can take more than a crowded open house to convince buyers that they may have to move quickly and pay more than expected.

“When they make that first offer and there’s multiple offers on something – that shell-shocks them,” Schneiderman said. “Some buyers think we’re just making this stuff up.”

Circumstances force them to learn quickly. Myra von Turkovich, a broker with Hammond Residential Real Estate in Cambridge, had a townhouse listing recently. Prior sales in the same neighborhood had been around $800,000, but when a nearby house went onto the market and received five offers, Turkovich and her seller decided to list their property for $875,000. They received 15 offers, and the property sold for about 10 percent over list price.

“People were taking out their mortgage contingencies, their building inspections contingencies,” she said. “It’s an amazing market.”

Crazy Pockets

What’s more, many house seekers have plenty of ammunition to bring to the party. Cash sales, which began rising as investors entered the low end of the market, are making up a considerable percentage of purchases at all levels as buyers who’ve been sitting on the sidelines for years enter the market. Year-to-date, cash sales – those sales that do not involve a recorded mortgage – made up 22.6 percent of single-family home purchases in the commonwealth, according to The Warren Group.

Amy Mizner, broker/owner at Benoit, Mizner, Simon & Co., said she’s seeing multiple bids across the area she serves, which includes Weston and Wellesley.

“Being in the trenches, we’re seeing things moving quickly,” she said. “As long as the properties are fairly priced, we’re seeing activity and offers.”

“We just experienced a property that was [listed] over $3 million and did go over asking. And we had a situation in Waban, in Newton, with a property priced under $1 million, where we had 14 offers. Just to be able to handle the 14 offers, we’re really back in the old market,” she said. “You get these pockets where it’s crazy. People are still looking for desirable schools systems and desirable commutes into Boston, and those are the areas with the highest demand.”

But agents cautioned that even with a flood of new buyers in the market looking to purchase, many are still leery of paying too much. Anne Rendle, CEO of the Westford-based Northeast Association of Realtors, cautioned that agents in her area have been telling sellers “the thing that can kill the fragile recovery is if they return to the days of ‘oh, my house is worth X,’” without considering any other offers, she said.