Greater Boston’s once-sizzling home sales have cooled so much this fall that realtors are reverting to a description not heard in a decade: ”Buyer’s market.”
From the South End to the South Shore to Cape Ann, the list of unsold properties is growing, and so are reductions in asking prices. Attractive houses in good locations with seemingly appropriate pricetags are getting scant interest. Real estate agents, who six months ago played host to streams of buyers, are now presiding over open houses that draw few if any lookers.
For the last two Sundays, John Ford, of Ford Realty Inc., held open houses at a two-bedroom South End condo on a strong residential block of Columbus Avenue with parking, patio, and hardly outrageous asking price of $570,000. Not a single person showed up. In Weymouth, a four-bedroom raised-ranch with a view of the Fore River, priced at $445,000, attracted just one couple in the first hour and 15 minutes of an open house last weekend, prompting realtor Bonnie Goodstein to exult, ”O yay! Customers!”
In Jamaica Plain, even a $70,000 price cut — to $399,000 — hasn’t generated much interest in a two-bedroom, bi-level condo in a 19th century mansion that has been on the market for about a month. Sunday, only four people, including two curious neighbors, came to an open house.
”My seller is willing” to consider a lower price, said the broker, Anne Connolly, ”but there’s no buyers to deal with.”
The fall slowdown not only represents a sea change for sellers, who for years have enjoyed multiple offers and higher prices, but also indicates the region’s bull housing market is at an end. Real estate agents say a long-predicted market correction appears underway as the gap between the price of housing and peoples’ incomes — now even wider than at peak of the 1980s housing boom — has become too great to sustain the recent pace of sales and appreciation.
Certainly, few expect an ’80s-style collapse, when home values plunged 25 percent or more.Today, the economy and lenders are far stronger, and mortgage rates, which topped 10 percent when the last boom went bust, are far lower — currently about 6 percent. In the 1980s, overbuilding, unsound lending practices, and intense speculation by investors, along with higher interest rates, sparked a real-estate crash.
Still, real estate agents today increasingly are telling sellers to expect lower prices than comparable sellers received six months ago. Linda O’Koniewski, owner of Re/Max Heritage in Melrose, said her brokerage is still selling houses, but at prices 5-to-10 percent lower than what comparable homes sold for in spring.
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