The Greater Boston housing market has slowed down substantially, by all accounts, but by one marker it’s doing so much more, well, slowly than its peers.
A new analysis by economists at combined brokerage and listings portal site Redfin found that 17.5 percent of Greater Boston single-family and condominium sellers gave concessions to buyers fourth-quarter home sales, up a mere 3.5 percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2021 according to data submitted by Redfin buyers’ agents across the U.S.
That compares to 41.9 percent of sellers nationally, a 30 percent year-over-year jump, the highest share of any three-month period since Redfin started tracking the statistic in July 2020 and even greater than the 40.8 percent reading that month as the housing market was just beginning to emerge from its pandemic-induced halt.
Greater Boston’s housing market also leads the pack among similar, high-cost coastal metros. In Washington, D.C., 45.3 percent of sellers gave concessions in the fourth quarter, a 15 percent jump year-over-year, for example, and in Seattle the share of sellers giving concessions was up 25.6 percentage points to 46 percent. Only New York City performed better on this metric, with the share of sellers giving concessions actually shrinking 2.4 percentage points to 13.4 percent.
Redfin defined a concession as “when an agent reports a seller provided something that helped reduce the buyers’ total cost of purchasing the home. That could include money toward repairs, closing costs and/or mortgage-rate buy-downs. It does not include situations in which sellers lowered the listing price of their home.”
According to November data from the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, the most recent available, the pace of home sales in Greater Boston has slowed considerably.
Among single-family homes, listings took an average of 24 days to go off-market, compared to 21 in November 2021, and months’ supply of inventory hit 1.5 compared to 0.8 a year before. The cool-down is also showing up in prices. The average single-family seller only took in 98.9 percent of their asking price in November 2022, compared to 102.2 percent in November 2021.
Among condos, average days to off-market rose from 26 to 28 over the same period, while months supply of inventory rose from 1.7 to 2.6 and the average sold-to-original-price ratio went from 99.6 percent to 97.6 percent.
“As the market has cooled, it’s become more friendly to buyers,” 2022 GBAR President Melvin Vieira Jr. said in a statement released along with the association’s market data in late December. “While demand still exceeds supply, fewer and fewer properties are being sold before they are listed or shown. We’re also seeing home inspections become routine again, and multiple offers are now the exception rather than the rule, so properties are no longer being bid up thousands of dollars over asking price. The bottom-line is sellers no longer have the luxury to name their price and terms, and buyers have more time and a greater ability to negotiate than they’ve had in quite some time,”