After record breaking snow levels kept home buyers off the real estate market, Boston's housing market is now booming, with home sales up on an annual basis for the month of June.
Boston home sales rose to nearly 9 percent in June, states CNBC, higher than same period a year ago, according to data from Greater Boston Association of Realtors. This helped to drive the cost of median home price to over $400,000 which, figures CoreLogic, is a 5 percent increase from previous year.
In the report, CNBC mentioned the boost is attributed to Boston's strong economic strength, which the city gets from industries such as finance, health care and education. Boston also has world-class universities and medical facilities, including a thriving biotech industry. This helped to keep the demand for housing up, amidst low supply.
P.T. Vineburgh, founding partner at Charlesgate Realty Group, stated Boston's low supply of houses is making the real estate market for potential home buyers extremely competitive. "They say a balanced market has six months of inventory and as of Q2 stats, we have six weeks of inventory. It's a highly competitive climate," Vineburgh said.
Vineburgh added that the historic neighborhood in the city has also kept Boston from building new homes to fuel the supply. He explained, "Many times in historic and protected neighborhoods like Back Bay, there's only so much you can do from a physical standpoint whether it's height or aesthetics, density, whatever, it's very difficult to bring on any meaningful number of new housing units to start to catch up with the demand."
Meanwhile, David McCarthy, President of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors (GBAR), mentioned Boston's house listing inventory have started to fill up since the start of summer, reports PRNewswire. McCarthy stated that the build-up in listing inventory is mostly in the suburban communities, which means availability of a larger selection of homes. The GBAR executive added, "That means... less upward pressure on prices which should benefit buyers and keep the market busy."
