‘DEMAND IS STILL THERE’
Conn. home sales top 2019 totals, but well below high volume seen during pandemic
Connecticut house and land purchases dropped 22 percent from 2022 to just over 35,500 transactions, according to preliminary estimates published by Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties. While well below the levels of the pandemic real estate boom that began in 2020, Connecticut sales remained well above the levels of 2019 and prior years.
With many apartment dwellers fed up with escalated rents, real estate professionals expect another strong year in 2024, particularly if there’s any easing in interest rates that the Federal Reserve pumped up the past few years to tamp down runaway inflation sparked by the pandemic. Connecticut employment remains near record levels, and the stock market roared upward starting in late October to give an extra boost of security to some house hunters.
“There are signs of the market loosening up with interest rates declining,” Candace Adams, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties told CT Insider this week. “We anticipate inventory will slowly build, but probably not enough to satisfy demand, which means an active spring market bordering a frenzy in buying. As long as interest rates stabilize, we anticipate a fairly good lift in 2024 and beyond.”
New listings hitting the Connecticut market ebbed 20 percent from the prior year, though nearly as many people put homes up for sale in December as the final month of 2022.
The CEO of Stamford-based William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty takes that as a possible signal that more people could put their houses up for sale this year. A mix of factors could be at play, including some paying off mortgages on their current homes at low interest rates they locked in years before, which has discouraged them from taking on new mortgages at today’s higher interest rates.
“Demand is still there — not as much as in the pandemic obviously, but enough,” said William Pitt Sotheby’s CEO Paul Breunich, speaking Thursday with CT Insider. “With mortgage rates coming down, we feel ... people will be more comfortable putting their house on the market.”
The median-priced home in Connecticut sold for $370,000, with just over 270 properties in the state going for that amount. They
ranged from a 19th-century Victorian on Woodlawn Terrace in Waterbury with nine bedrooms and a wrap-around porch, to a townhouse in Stamford’s Chesterfield association on Bedford Street, where the buyer plunked down an extra $20,000 over the next bidder to get the keys.
Statewide, buyers paid 2.9 percent above listed prices on average to land new homes, compared to a 2.4 percent premium in 2022 as calculated by Berkshire Hathaway. Many sellers cut prices by varying margins in advance of those final listed prices, however, initially putting their houses on the market at prices well below what buyers proved willing to pay.
Stamford again led Connecticut for home sales in 2023 with about 1,150 in all. Berkshire Hathaway’s preliminary data shows Norwalk edging Waterbury by a single transaction as the next biggest market, both seeing just over 900 properties change hands.
But with Stamford transactions 28 percent below 2022 numbers, the city also had the second steepest drop-off in sales from the prior years among the dozen biggest markets statewide. Only in Danbury did sales fall by a higher margin — down 32 percent to about 615 home sales for 2023.
Greenwich and Milford were the only municipalities in the top dozen where sales dropped less than 20 percent. With Greenwich generating national attention for the $139 million purchase of Copper Beech Farm, the town bested many in Fairfield County with sales off just 17 percent, compared to a 24 percent county-wide decline.
Breunich noted that buyers able to afford multimillion homes are typically less affected by fluctuations in interest rates, with many paying cash for a sizable percentage of the purchase.
A handful of towns saw sales increase last year by varying margins, led by Bozrah with a 46 percent gain and Southbury where 21 more buyers surfaced last year for a 6 percent increase. Others topping their 2022 transaction totals included Deep River, East Windsor, Hartland, Sharon and Sprague.
Andover, Franklin, Morris and Union tied their 2022 totals, while Ashford, Beacon Falls, Cornwall, Kent, Westbrook, and Windsor Locks came just short of breakeven for home sales in 2023.