Home sales were up overall in 2013 but slowed toward the end of the year.
Craig Douglas
Managing Editor, Online Research- Boston Business Journal
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While the froth was building early in many of Greater Boston’s most popular housing markets in 2013, it runneth over and then some to more affordable, if not marginal, neighborhoods such as East Boston, Roxbury and Mattapan as the year progressed.
Back in April 2013, we reported that traditional hot-spots such as Brookline and Newton were booming ahead of the Bay State’s spring market, with brokers sharing anecdotes of listings being snapped up above asking prices and lines for open houses stretching around city blocks.
The pace of dealmaking only increased as 2013 progressed. By the second quarter, it was clear that near record-low interest rates and pent up demand was spurring first-time homebuyers and investors to pour into neighborhoods stocked with condos and multifamily housing. ZIP codes in Dorchester, Brighton and Cambridge were being thrust back to pre-recession pricing levels.
By September, that activity was bubbling over into neighborhoods that were among the last to rise and the hardest to fall during the previous decade’s housing debacle. While speculators and over-extended homebuyers were to blame back then, local brokers told the BBJ that much of the new activity was being driven by cash-flush investors seeking properties on the cheap. Neighborhoods in East Boston, Roxbury and Mattapan — some of the same neighborhoods whipsawed by the housing downturn — were back in the conversation.
Little has changed in the interim, as East Boston and other markets saturated with multifamily housing once again topped the BBJ’s list of the Hottest Housing Markets in Massachusetts, this time for the fourth quarter.
The analysis uses data provided by Zillow.com to create a basket of sales and pricing metrics that identify the local home markets most — and least — in demand. The research, which included data for 340 ZIP codes in the state, is conducted on on a quarterly basis, in this case the three months that ended Dec. 31.
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