MARY O’CONNELL
WESTFIELD – While home sales in Massachusetts fell by 14 percent statewide in April compared to last year, according to a story by Michael P. Norton in the State House News Service this week, Mary O’Connell of Wolcott Realty said the market in western Massachusetts “is poised to rebound this summer.”
O’Connell said the drop in single family home sales in Hampden County was down even further, at 28.2%, in part due to COVID-19 concerns.
“The stock market was showing signs of uncertainty and fear of exposure caused many sellers and buyers to postpone listing or purchasing real estate. The result was an overall decline in closed sales,” she explained.
However, O’Connell said statistics support an unusually strong market this summer.
Norton cites the Warren Group’s statistic that the median home sale price jumped nearly 12% to $428,000, up from $383,000 in April 2019. That was the highest median sale price ever recorded for April in the state. O’Connell said in western Massachusetts, the median price of home sales was up 11.2% in April, while inventory was down 42.3% during the same period.
“Those numbers support a strong seller’s market. At the same time historically low home 30-year fixed rate mortgage rates are holding steady at 3.31%,” O’Connell said, which supports a strong buyer’s market.
The Warren Group reports that sales drops were most pronounced last month in Hampden and Suffolk counties, where the volume was off by 30 percent, and in Barnstable and Berkshire counties, which were down more than 20 percent.
“The number of single-family home sales took a significant hit in April as the effects of COVID-19 started to impact the local housing market and economy,” said Tim Warren, CEO of The Warren Group. “This comes as no surprise. I fully expected transactions to stall as the stay-at-home order continues to keep both buyers and sellers on the sidelines.”
Norton wrote that condo sales fell 19 percent in April, The Warren Group said, with the median condo sale price rising 13.8 percent to $421,000, another record for April.
The state’s plan for phased business reopenings might lead to more in-person home shopping this summer. Meanwhile, Wolcott Realty, as many other brokerage firms are doing, is offering Virtual Tours on its listings for buyers who may not feel safe initially viewing a property, O’Connell said
