‘BUYERS ARE REALLY UPSET’
Median home sale prices on pace to set records across Connecticut
Three months into 2021, nearly half of all Connecticut towns are on pace to beat their record median home sale prices set over the preceding 18 years, according to a SmartMLS analysis provided to Hearst Connecticut Media of most statewide municipalities.
In Westport, a stampede of buyers arrived from New York City and elsewhere to purchase 115 homes between January and March
of 2021. The median-priced home sold for $1.7 million — far above the $1.36 million record that has stood for 13 years.
If Westport is out front, a herd of Connecticut communities are hot on its heels.
Greenwich, after easing past its previous record median in 2019 by less than $40,000 last year, is on pace to surpass that mark in 2021. Out of roughly 190 sales in the first quarter, the medianpriced home sold for $2.2 million — more than $380,000 above the 2020 median, for a 22 percent increase.
Though it’s a relatively small sample size — and with nine months to go — real estate agents say the market shows no sign of letting up, as buyers put in cash bids in an effort to sway sellers to accept their offers over competing bids.
“Holy cow — yeah, what a market,” said Ryan Raveis, co-president of William Raveis Real Estate. “There’s very, very high demand, in two forms: moves within the state of Connecticut [with] people feeling the need to get more space, over and above their existing home. And particularly in southwest Connecticut, we’re seeing an influx of buyers from New York City.”
Add in millennial buyers deciding to buy starter homes, and you’ve got stiff competition at every turn, tempered by a slowdrip of new listings to replace the best properties that are going fast.
As a result, many buyers are left without reasonable options, regardless of how determined they are to land a new place to live.
“I’m hoping that with the warm weather we shake out some more properties to sell,” said Candace Adams, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties. “Buyers ... are really upset.”
Towns on record pace
First-quarter median prices were up more than 40 percent over previous annual highs in the Litchfield County towns of Bridgewater, New Hartford and Warren.
Small towns can see median prices skewed significantly due to small sample sizes, however, and Litchfield County is a prime example. In 2010, when Connecticut was in the grips of the Great Recession, the median home in Kent sold for nearly $650,000, about $200,000 more than the next closest years, as calculated by SmartMLS.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite the massive buying binge in Connecticut beginning last May, fewer than 30 towns set highs for annual median prices in 2020.
And despite a renewed boom for waterside communities, only Fairfield, Milford, Westbrook, Old Saybrook and Groton joined Greenwich in setting median price records last year, among the two dozen fronting Long Island Sound from Connecticut’s Gold Coast to Stonington on the Rhode Island border.
Statewide, less than half as many communities set record medians in 2020 compared to the easy-money days of 2006, as banks approved “subprime” loans cobbled together by mortgage brokers with interest rates that ballooned after a set period of years.
With borrowers not keeping pace with their own earnings gains, many of those loans went into arrears and foreclosure. Between 2011 and 2019, Darien, Bridgewater, Roxbury and Franklin were the only Connecticut towns to set record median prices.
William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty CEO Paul Breunich said that many buyers from New York City and Westchester County factor in price per square foot as an equal criterion to median home price data. As of March, Fairfield County homes were selling at $286 per square foot, a 21 percent increase from March 2020.
“This quarter has dwarfed last year, which was ahead of the year before,” Breunich said. “Quantity comes into play with median prices, like in a small town . ... But if you have a big-velocity market like Greenwich or Westport where there’s a lot of turnover, that’s when the median becomes even more of a good [data] point to be looking at.”
With more than 70 Connecticut municipalities seeing first-quarter median prices above their prior annual records — and the prime selling months of April through June now in full swing — more will follow, predicts Berkshire Hathaway’s Adams.
“It’s a frenzy that is so incredible, and we thought maybe it would settle down a little — but it hasn’t,” Adams said. “There couldn’t be a better time to sell. There won’t be.”
The pricing pressure is being exerted across the range of home values and geographies. Waterbury, which SmartMLS lists as having the lowest record median price in any year at just under $168,000 in 2006, led Connecticut in with more than 220 transactions in the first quarter with the median home going for $180,000.
“This is my 26th year and I have never seen anything like it,” said SmartMLS CEO Kathy Elson.