Hot Vermont Housing Market Starting to Cool Off

The super-hot Vermont housing market of the first half of this decade has cooled, with home prices stabilizing or even declining in some areas and properties taking longer to sell.

That’s what real estate agents and mortgage brokers say they see on the street, a consensus backed up by statistics from Allen & Brooks, a Burlington-area firm that analyzes the Vermont housing market.

“The home prices reached a point where they didn’t make sense,” said Steve Allen of Allen & Brooks of the run-up in home prices that appears to have peaked.

Statewide, prices have grown slightly from 2006 to this year, according to the firm’s latest study, from a median price for a single-family home of $205,000 growing to $210,000.

The most telling stat pointing to a cooling market is not home mortgage activity but housing sales. Allen’s firm found they were down 23 percent in the first four months of this year from the same period in 2006.

Hank Gintof, owner of Signature Properties of Vermont in Essex, said sellers looking for prices that homes were demanding in the super-heated market are more often ending up disappointed.

“If you have sellers hanging on to ‘05 prices and refusing to give up, they’re not selling,” he said. “If the price is right, it’s selling.”

Kathy Sweeten, executive vice president of the Northwestern Vermont Board of Realtors, offered a different picture. She said sales by brokers in the area were up slightly while prices were down a bit.

Allen’s firm tracks property transfer records filed around Vermont; the Board of Realtors uses sales reported by brokers.

As mortgage rates continue to rise throughout New England and the nation, it will be interesting to monitor the effects on the Vermont market.

SOURCE: Montpelier-Barre Times-Argus