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!