Availability is the new affordability Jon Gorey
Realtors and housing experts are warning of a difficult spring for first-time home buyers. Prices already had climbed for seven straight years before skyrocketing during the pandemic. With buyer demand far outpacing the number of homes for sale, median home prices were up 12.9 percent in December compared with the year before, marking the 106th consecutive month of year-over-year price gains, according to the National Association of Realtors.
And incomes haven’t kept pace with those fast-rising home prices. Even before the pandemic, “prices were about 4.3 times higher than the median household income,” said Alex Hermann, senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. That basic measure of housing affordability, already at its worst level since 2006, almost certainly rose again in 2020. “Nationally, price-to-income ratios have risen for eight straight years,” he said.
Why availability is the new affordability in home buying boston.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from boston.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
6 Tips for Finding a House You Can Actually Afford Money.com 1/13/2021
Rising home prices are forcing buyers to get creative.
Just take recent homebuyers Zac Alfson and his husband, Bryan Henley. They were set on buying a house in downtown Orlando last fall one with a guest room, a dedicated home office and plenty of storage space. Being near bike trails was also a priority for Henley, who’s a busy ICU nurse and avid cyclist.
When it was clear the couple wouldn’t find a picture-perfect place within their price range at least downtown, they settled for a fixer-upper instead. They’re now proud residents of the Rock Lake neighborhood, just a mile from Orlando’s center.
Prepare to launch Jon Gorey
The words we might use to describe 2020 “tragic,” “turbulent,” “surreal,” “recessionary,” “isolating,” and, of course, “unprecedented” wouldn’t seem to suggest a booming real estate market. And yet, aside from a brief pause in early spring, the housing market remained red-hot this year, one of just a few bright spots in an otherwise strained economy.
When the sawdust settles on the 2020 housing market, Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, expects the United States will end the year with a 3 percent increase in home sales and a 6 percent uptick in prices over 2019. The median price of a Massachusetts single-family house has risen even faster 11.3 percent, year to date through November, to $455,000, according to The Warren Group though sales were up just 1.5 percent from last year.
Jon Gorey - Globe Correspondent December 22, 2020 12:02 pm
The words we might use to describe 2020 “tragic,” “turbulent,” “surreal,” “recessionary,” “isolating,” and, of course, “unprecedented” wouldn’t seem to suggest a booming real estate market. And yet, aside from a brief pause in early spring, the housing market remained red-hot this year, one of just a few bright spots in an otherwise strained economy.
When the sawdust settles on the 2020 housing market, Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, expects the United States will end the year with a 3 percent increase in home sales and a 6 percent uptick in prices over 2019. The median price of a Massachusetts single-family house has risen even faster 11.3 percent, year to date through November, to $455,000, according to The Warren Group though sales were up just 1.5 percent from last year.