Housing market cooling

Sales are down. Prices are leveling off. New listings are plummeting. A report out Tuesday from the Greater Boston Association of Realtors shows that it is all but certain now: The region’s long-hot housing market is cooling off fast. Only 1,092 homes were sold in September in the 64 cities and towns GBAR tracks, a 12.7 percent drop from the same month last year. Condominium sales slid by 39.6 percent, from 1,207 sold in September 2021 to 729 last month. And new listings of both single-family homes and condos were down sharply. In other words, both buyers and sellers are recoiling from a volatile economy. Perhaps even more indicative of how quickly things are cooling, the median price of a single-family home in the region was $763,000 in September, up just 1.7 percent compared to last year, a pace far slower than the 8.6 percent growth seen for the first nine months of the year to date, and the slowest annual growth rate since the market briefly hit a slow patch in 2019. It was the third straight month prices have ticked downward, since an all-time high of $899,950 in June. There are numerous factors driving buyers out of the market right now: the looming possibility of a recession, anxieties surrounding inflation, and a general lack of housing stock, to name a few. But more than anything, surging mortgage interest rates have simply pushed homebuying out of reach for many. The national average rate on a 30-year-fixed mortgage currently sits at 6.94 percent, according to Freddie Mac, the highest point since 2002 and more than double where it was at the start of the year. That means a buyer who puts 20 percent down on a median-priced home in Greater Boston would have monthly payments more than $1,400 higher than they would have been on the same-priced house in January. — ANDREW BRINKER