Single-family home sales surged in December

Single-family home sales in Connecticut closed out 2015with a flourish, reaching a level in December that the market hadn’t seen since 2006, according to a new report by the Warren Group, the Boston-based publisher of The Commercial Record.

There were 2,588 singlefamily home sold in the state during December, which represents a 17.9 percent rise over the 2,196 that were sold during the same period in 2014. December’s performance allowed Connecticut’s housing market to finish 2015 with 29,986 single-family homes, a 16.9 percent increase over all of 2014.

Median sale prices for single-family homes in Connecticut for both December and all of 2015 were down slightly.

The median sale price for December 2015 was $235,000. That is down 2.1 percent from the same month in 2014, when the median was $240,000.

The 2015 median price for single-family homes in Connecticut was $246,000, a 2.2 percent drop from 2014, when the median price was $251,500.

Timothy Warren Jr., chief executive officer of the Warren Group, said “a significant amount of pent-up demand” was responsible for the December housing numbers in Connecticut in December and during 2015 as a whole.

“It has been building for close to a decade when sales volume has been abnormally low,” Warren said in a statement. “The spike in sales shows that people are finally confident enough in their jobs and incomes that they are eager to buy homes.”

According to Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist and director of research for New Havenbased DataCore Partners, there is evidence that Warren’s assessment is correct.

The job recovery rate in neighboring Massachusetts is roughly two-anda-half times what Connecticut has experienced, Klepper-Smith said. Connecticut still has not recovered all of the jobs that it lost in the last recession, he said.

Connecticut out-performed Massachusetts in terms of percentage increase in the sale of singlefamily homes. There was a 10.5 percent improvement in the number of singlefamily homes sold in Massachusetts in 2015 compared to a year earlier, Klepper-Smith said.

But Massachusetts outperformed Connecticut in median sale price for single-family homes. While the median sale price of Connecticut homes decreased, it increased by 3 percent in Massachusetts, he said.

Condominium and townhouse sales in the state made a little progress in December: the 619 that were sold during the final month of 2015 represented a 2.7 percent increase over the same period in 2014.

Full-year sales growth of condominiums was more robust, with a 13.3 percent increase last year over the 6,961 that were sold in 2014.