Home buyers in the Route 495 region beware: buyers may be turning up the heat on the MA real estate market.
There was massive, positively overwhelming home buyer turn out at open houses in Lexington, MA this past weekend.
Such strong buyer activity in one community might be the leading edge of a developing real estate market rebound in Massachusetts this spring.
Take careful note of buyer activity
Unwary home buyers may face stronger than expected buyer competition as the spring 2010 home buying season gets underway.
While Franklin’s home sale statistics were weak in February, showing activity and attendance at open houses were strong throughout the month.
These indifferent market stats may be masking building market strength.
Hordes of buyers, one leaves open house in tears
I had the opportunity to show homes in the Route 128 region last Saturday. What my buyer clients and I experienced in Lexington provided quite a wake-up call!
When my buyers and I drove up to the first Lexington open house we attended, we immediately noticed something unusual: the street was literally packed with parked cars and there was a line waiting to get inside the open house.
There were over 30 buyers crowded into the home.
It was so packed inside that you could not walk from room to room without squeezing by people. Here’s a photo of all the shoes in the entry foyer:
One shocked buyer literally left the home in tears apparently due to all the prospective competition she encountered.
Multiple sign-in sheets at another open house
The next house on our list was a brand new listing with just one day on the market under its belt prior to the scheduled open house.
Turnout was very heavy; just look at the open house sign-in logs!
Note that due to privacy concerns I purposely blurred the photo to make the names illegible.
One weekend of heavy buyer showing activity in one highly desirable Massachusetts community close to Boston proves nothing about how the real estate market will play out in 2010.
But heavy open house attendance is exactly how a real estate market can heat up:
Showings beget showings and heavy showing volume begets offers.
A few listings go under agreement and buyers on the fence act to snap up the other homes for sale in town because they don’t want to miss out.
One town’s inventory gets thin, and buyers move onto the next town’s better offerings.
The process then repeats itself and a home-buying surge spreads.
I’m not saying this will happen in 2010, but last weekend’s events could be a forecast of rising temperatures in the MA housing market!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Kathy Stankard 03.09.10 at 7:36 am
Warren–Thanks for that enlightening blog. How fascinating it is to know of differences between towns.
Kathy
Warren Reynolds 03.10.10 at 9:20 am
Dear Kathy,
Thank you for the comment.
I found the Saturday open house experience in Lexington, MA to be disturbing: there’s way too much pent-up housing demand for the health of the overall real estate market in Massachusetts.
Such an overflow of buyers as I saw last Saturday is bad for home buyers (obviously) but also bad for everyone else as it shows a housing market fundamentally out of balance.
Massachusetts needs thousands of new single family homes priced in the $300,000s-$400,000s to be built within reasonable commuting distance to Boston and the Route 128 region.
And that’s not going to happen due to a lot of factors including restrictive zoning, high land costs, and the inability of municipal budgets to cope with the cost of providing public education and other services to the residents of all those new homes.
That fundamental lack of affordable housing in MA is why there was a warning sounded in the 2009 edition of the Greater Boston Housing Report Card that another round of home price increases in Massachusetts is likely.
The Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University stated in the 2009 Report Card that as the MA economy improves 2010 and beyond, buyers will start bidding up home prices again.
We all would be better off with an adequate supply of homes to meet the needs of state residents. The scene last weekend in Lexington was almost scary!