High bidding drives Connecticut home sales above asking prices

May Xu was as busy as anyone Saturday with dozens of people lining up to check out a West Hartford house the broker is listing for sale.

Across Connecticut, the spring real estate market is hitting its stride with buyers seeking new listings that might meet their needs and price points. And when they find one, they are bidding aggressively, according to

Xu, a broker in the West Hartford office of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties.

“Some people, they just pay cash,” Xu said. “They show you their statements to prove they can.”

In March, Hartford County had the most Connecticut single-family home sales above asking prices, according to the SmartMLS multiple listing service. Buyers paid an average of 4.6 percent above listing prices in Hartford County in March, the data showed.

That helped nudge average Hartford County prices up to around $342,000 — a 10 percent increase from March 2021, the data showed.

In March, Hartford County houses sold in just 33 days, one week faster than in New Haven County, according to the data.

On average, about 16 prospective buyers showed up in March for every house listed for sale in Bridgeport and lower Fairfield County, according to monthly data tabulated by Zillow subsidiary ShowingTime, whose online appointment booking platform is popular among brokerages.

That ranked in the top-10 hottest markets nationally. Of the top 25, only Burlington, Vt., and Fort Collins, Colo., had bigger increases in the ratio of March showings to listings from a year earlier.

With the list including greater Hartford and the New Haven-Milford area, Connecticut was among three states — along with Colorado and Ohio — to have three regions on the ShowingTime top-25 list for March.

Bridgeport and lower Fairfield County have been fixtures on the ShowingTime list in each of the first three months of 2022. In addition to southwest Connecticut, only Rochester,

N.Y., Trenton, N.J., and Virginia Beach, Va., have seen the ratio of showings to listings increase in each of the first three months of the year.

Determining how hot a particular real estate market is depends on the data set.

Realtor.com has several variables on its own monthly list, including how many views a property draws on its website. In March, New Haven ranked as the 16thhottest market in the nation on the Realtor.com ranking of 300 locales. Hartford was also in the top-50, but the Greenwich-Bridgeport area ranked in the bottom half.

The ShowingTime list captures an extra dimension in the buyers who take the time to visit properties — though as an average it does not reveal the extremes.

Heading into the weekend in West Hartford, the Hilltop Drive house listed by Xu had scheduled the most showings in Connecticut among properties listed for sale by Berkshire Hathaway. As of Friday morning, nearly three dozen buyers had registered to see the three-bedroom house on a small lot priced at $350,000. Xu cited the local elementary school and proximity to downtown

West Hartford as contributing to the appeal.

“I don’t know how high it will go,” Xu said.