The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
From Greenwich to Stonington, state’s home market stays hot
It is close to a two-hour drive from Newtown’s landmark flagpole to the waterfront flagpole at the tip of Stonington Point.
But this past week, a pair of Connecticut homes at opposite ends of the state were otherwise pretty close in one respect as their owners hiked the price tags for the 2021 selling season.
As expected amid the coronavirus pandemic, Connecticut home sales shot out of the gate in 2021. Transactions were up 27 percent from January 2020 to more than 3,500 in total according to early data posted by Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties.
Factoring in just the five counties forming an elongated “L” from the spine of Litchfield and Fairfield County and running east along Long Island Sound, sales spiked more than a third. New listings are only just barely keeping up with transactions, however, with Berkshire Hathaway reporting just 53 more new listings than homes sold in January. By comparison, in the first month of 2020 close to 1,700 more homes statewide were listed than those sold.
On Monday, the owner of a Hanover Road home just off Newtown’s historic center listed the house on ForSaleByOwner.com for $535,000, a 13 percent increase from last year when the home first hit the market. On the opposite end of Connecticut in Stonington, the owner of a Water Street home dating to the American Revolution tacked on 10 percent to what they were seeking in November, pushing the Berkshire Hathaway listing to $1.3 million.
“There’s only two-and-a-half months of inventory on the market, which is unbelievable,” said Candace Adams, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties. “A healthy market would be six to eight months of inventory that we could sell . ... They’re selling as quickly as they are going on.”
The limited demand has prices continuing to escalate for attractive options, the result of both buyers bidding up the prices of available properties and wealthy New Yorkers continuing to pick and choose among the poshest spreads. Using the universal measure of price-per-square-foot across all houses, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty calculated an 18 percent increase in what Fairfield County sales fetched in January.
January sales were running more than double their level of a year ago in New Canaan, with Greenwich sales up 75 percent and Stamford up 60 percent.
In the Conyers Farm enclave in Greenwich, Compass listed an English manor over the weekend for $22 million, a nearly 40 percent premium from 2015 when it was last sold and putting it among the 10 highest in Connecticut. In Southport, a mansion fronting Long Island Sound was listed by William Raveis Real Estate for $14 million, ranking it in Connecticut’s top 10 outside Greenwich.
Statewide, the median home sold for $295,000, a 22 percent increase from the equivalent property in January 2020 according to Berkshire Hathaway.
Whether at the upper end of the market or the lower, that has some sellers reassessing their assumptions last year of what buyers will pay, against historically low interest rates, getting under contract ahead of any rival buyers putting in offers, and any considerations for COVID-19.
“We’re still seeing people buying what they would consider second homes,” Adams said. “The only difference is we’re seeing them go further and further out (as) they are getting more comfortable working from home. They are buying where there’s better value, ... they are going up the shore line of of Connecticut.”