Mass. housing costs still going through the roof

The coronavirus has thrown a curve into virtually every aspect of our lives, disrupting our normal routines and shuttering all but essential businesses.

With another 38,000 Massachusetts workers filing for unemployment compensation last week, it’s difficult to find a silver lining in this COVID-19 cloud.

We might have thought all this economic uncertainty would temper demand for big-ticket items like automobiles and housing.

The wheels might have come off auto sales, but not the state’s overheated housing market.

While this virus has cooled the usually busy spring house-hunting season, it’s done nothing to temper demand — or already heady prices.

That’s despite a nearly 14% plunge in Massachusetts home sales during April.

Buyers and sellers did manage to complete 3,706 transactions, even with the surge in COVID-19 cases and related deaths, which kept most of us at home, working remotely if we were still employed.

According to real-estate trackers the Warren Group, single-family home sales statewide fell 13.7% in April, compared to April 2019. It was the biggest drop in home sales since April 2011, when sales slid 26.8% and the median home sale price was $271,000.

Nonetheless, the median home sale price jumped nearly 12% to $428,000, up from $383,000 in April 2019. That was the highest median sale price ever recorded for April.

Likewise, while April condo sales fell 19%, the median sale price rose 13.8% to $421,000, another April record.

Home and condo sales are both up for the year through April, with the median home sale price at $400,000 and the median condo sale price at $415,000.

In Greater Boston, the epicenter of this inflated housing market, already pricey real estate soared even higher.

There the median price of a single-family home increased more than 7% to an April record high, $665,000, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors. The median condominium price climbed 8.6%, to $598,224.

But as elsewhere, the number of houses and condos sold fell nearly 11%, according to GBAR data, due in part to a nearly 30% drop in available inventory.

And homes under contract to close in May also have plummeted — down more than 50%.

Real estate appears immune to our state’s fluctuating economic conditions, and that’s not comforting news for aspiring first-time homebuyers.

That’s even the case far away from Boston and its toney suburbs.

Warren Group CEO Tim Warren believes the housing market will heat up this summer, as sellers become more comfortable with life under COVID-19, and agents adopt new techniques to show houses in a socially distant manner.

Without comprehensive housing-creation legislation from Beacon Hill, the rising affordability gap will continue to make a bad situation even worse.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3dmUdPq