Massachusetts Housing Market Regains Some Momentum
Two reports issued Monday give hope to Massachusetts mortgage applicants - and home sellers. The price of a Massachusetts single family residence rose 0.1 percent in March, welcome news after a year-to-year price drop of 4.1 percent in February.
The Massachusetts Association of Realtors also reported that while the total number of homes sold fell, prices held steady in March for single-families and rose for condos.
“The [Massachusetts housing market] is now gaining in momentum,” association president Doug Azarian said in a statement.
In a separate report, the Warren Group said that sales of single-family homes in the first quarter fell by less than 1 percent, the smallest decline for Massachusetts in the past nine quarters.
In March, the number of single-family homes sold in Massachusetts was 4,239, down 5 percent from March 2006, the Warren Group said; the median selling price for a single family home in March was $314,900, down 1.6 percent from a year ago.
As Massachusetts mortgage costs remained somewhat firm, the number of condos sold in March declined 8.7 percent to 2,366 from March 2006, the Warren Group said, and the median selling price fell 2.7 percent to $267,625.
In a statement, Warren Group chief executive Timothy Warren Jr. looked at the market in the context of the first quarter - the first three months of 2007.
“An increase in sales in January - they rose 5.8 percent - balanced out March’s decline and helped the first quarter end on a relatively flat note,” Warren said.
“The declines in prices also decreased as the quarter went on, starting at 4.8 percent in January and ending at 1.6 percent in March. This is a stark difference from the higher declines in sales and home prices that we saw last year and is encouraging for the market.”
“As more buyers come out as the warmer weather approaches, I think we’ll see more of this type of stabilization in the coming months.”
The report from the Massashusetts Association of Realtors also looked at both March and results from the first quarter of 2007. Many of its findings were similar to the Warren Group’s.
One difference: realtors reported a slight increase in the March single family median selling price, while the Warren Group saw a modest decline.
The median selling price of a single family home in the Bay State was at$344,000 in March - still a hefty Massachusetts home loan sum - compared with $343,500 in March 2006, the association said.
The number of single family homes sold was 3,450, down 2.8 percent from March 2006, as mortgage applications continued to slow, the association said.
The median selling price of a Massachusetts condo rose 3 percent to $279,000, the association said, while the number of condos sold fell 1.4 percent from March 2006 to 1,765.
The association also released numbers for the first three months of 2007; that quarterly overview of the market included results by regions.
“Regionally, Greater Boston had the biggest jump in sales volume for single-family homes and condominiums with 13.8 percent and 15.4 percent gains respectively for the first quarter,” the association said.
For the quarter, Boston mortgage demand waned, and the median selling price for a single-family home in the state capitol fell 2 percent to $450,000.
On a volume basis, the number of single family homes sold in Massachusetts rose 2.8 percent to 8,603 when compared with first-quarter sales from 2006, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors said.
The median selling price for a single-family home declined 1.1 percent to 339,800 for the first quarter of 2007. The number of first-quarter condo sales, meanwhile, rose 2.1 percent to 4,298 units during the first quarter of 2007, and the median price was “virtually unchanged” at $274,000.
SOURCE: Boston Globe