Home Sales In Connecticut Are On Fire. How Long Will It Last?
CONNECTICUT — A new Connecticut housing market study has confirmed what real estate listing watchers have long suspected: pandemic home sales, and prices, are on fire.
The study from Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices compares average sales price and number of listings sold across 150 municipalities from January through November of 2019, 2020 and 2021.
After property sales tanked in the second quarter of 2020 as buyers bunkered down while the pandemic spun up, the housing market recovered masterfully in the last half of that year. Not only did buyers gobble up homes like jujubes, they paid top dollar — and often a bit more.
The average sales price of a home in Connecticut as of Nov. 30, 2021, is $539,473, compared to $464,337 in 2020 and $379,303 in 2019, according to the report. As you might expect, Nutmeg State home prices stacked up very favorably alongside the national median sale price which peaked at $386,000 in June, according to real estate megasite Redfin.
That new Connecticut normal represents a 16.2 percent increase in average sales price from 2020 to 2021, and a 22.4 percent increase in average sales price when comparing 2021 to 2019. There was an 18.2 percent increase in total sales from 2019 to 2021, as 5,981 additional residences were sold when comparing those two years.
With no context, the increase in total sales from 2020 to 2021 is not very impressive, less than 1 percent, for a total of 282 additional sales, 38,766 in 2021 compared to 38,488 in 2020. Seen through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic, however, the recovery is more dramatic: the increases were mostly all realized during the last half of the year when COVID-19 was busy shuttering the economies of the Northeast.
The Connecticut municipalities which enjoyed the highest number of sales through the end of November were:
The real estate market along Connecticut's fabled Gold Coast remains undimmed by the pandemic, according to the report. The average 2021 sales price for a home in Greenwich was approaching $3 million when the data was compiled at the end of November.
If the pandemic is having any effect on the Gold Coast, it's stretching it out a bit.
Candace Adams, President & CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England/Westchester/New York Properties/Hudson Valley Properties, said: "We are seeing a much bigger influx of people from New York moving up the shoreline to Madison, Saybrook, Clinton, Guilford — up into those shoreline towns, because they really can work from home, it's a different work habit, they may only have to go into the city a couple of days a week."
She predicted that the current coronavirus-flavored behavior would continue for the next 3-5 years, and that would be a good thing. The pandemic has had "nothing but a positive impact" on the residential real estate market, Adams said.
Commercial space is a different story.
"Retail is suffering," Adams told Patch. "A lot of commercial (real estate) is repurposing, taking warehouses and turning them into loft apartments ... I think there is a metamorphosis going on in commercially zoned properties, and I think we will continue to see that."
Something else real estate agents will continue to see is the online buyer. The pandemic accelerated our embrace of all things "virtual," and that includes home buying. The industry was already on a path to this, pre-pandemic, but COVID gave it a shove:
"It was going to happen anyway, and we all knew it, but it just went 'full speed ahead' in the last two years, and I don't think we're ever going to see that change," Adams said.
How long can this fire remain lit? That all depends on the fuel supply. According to the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices report, total 2022 home sales are not expected to reach 2021 numbers simply because Connecticut real estate agents are running out of inventory.
This article originally appeared on the Weston-Redding-Easton Patch
