‘It seems like no matter what happens, prices go up.' Why is Boston's spring housing market at a standstill?
All of that together has brought them to an uncomfortable realization.
'Unless it magically gets way cheaper, we can't really afford to buy here,' said Boylan, who is 30. 'Which feels completely insane given the fact that we objectively make more than a lot of people.'
Such is the reality of Greater Boston's housing market, which has become so stratified in recent years that even people who may otherwise be considered wealthy can barely afford to buy here anymore.
Spring is typically a busy time for homebuying. Sellers put their homes on the market as the ground thaws and trees begin to bud, and buyers tour open houses and make offers. Not in Greater Boston. Instead, the combination of sky-high prices and elevated interest rates are extending a three-year-long housing market malaise during which sellers simply haven't been putting their homes up for sale. Consider: Just 750 single-family homes across Greater Boston were listed for sale in February, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, down 13 percent from last year and 34 percent from February 2020. And now? Deep uncertainty about the state of the economy and stock markets is sidelining even more would-be buyers and sellers alike.
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Add it all up, and it feels like the gears of the housing market, which have already been turning slowly since interest rates rose in early 2022, have ground to a halt. And that has people like Boylan — and many, many people who are not well-paid tech workers — stuck in limbo.
Graham Boylan in his home office in Cambridge. Despite earning a six-figure salary as an engineer, Boylan plans to leave the area after failing to find an affordable home to buy.
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Of course, housing costs have been high in Greater Boston for decades. That's nothing new. But a wave of population growth in the 2010s, followed by a surge in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, sent prices soaring, putting the region among the most expensive in the country. Between 2015 and 2024, home values in the region grew by nearly 50 percent, according to
For most of that time, interest rates were historically low (the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage dipped below 3 percent in the second half of 2020 and most of 2021); that kept buying within reach for many, at least relative to paying the region's steep rents, because it meant monthly house payments stayed relatively low.
No longer. And it's not difficult to see why.
In February 2021, when the median home price in Greater Boston was around $650,000, the monthly mortgage payment on that median-priced house was around $2,100, according to Bankrate's mortgage calculator. Four years later, the median-priced house costs $887,000, interest rates have roughly doubled, and that monthly payment has soared to $4,700. Late last week, the rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage soared to 7 percent, according to Mortgage Daily News, driving that payment even higher.
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'What is staggering about what we're seeing now is that it wasn't by any stretch affordable to buy a home here before [interest rates rose],' said Paul Willen, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 'Typically, when you see rates go up like they did, you expect home prices to drop a bit. But it seems like no matter what happens prices go up in Boston.'
Why? A seemingly endless shortage of supply, coupled with demand that never seems to fade.
People still come in droves to open houses, said Mary Gillach, principal of the Gillach Group at William Raveis in Brookline. There is still intense demand for the homes that do go on the market, especially multimillion-dollar properties in Newton and other well-off western suburbs, because their buyers can afford to buy despite unfavorable economic conditions and probably aren't borrowing much or at all.
But for most everyone else, today's housing market is mostly untenable.
Melvin Vieira Jr., an agent at the Re/Max Real Estate Group in Jamaica Plain, sees the current state of the market like this: interest rates have sidelined many would-be sellers, because they have a low mortgage rate now and don't want to pay a higher rate on their next house. That means there's little supply going on the market and because prices are so high and demand so intense, many buyers are sidelined, too. Buying can be manageable here when you're putting up a big down payment and keeping monthly costs low, said Vieira Jr. But the combination of both high down payments and high monthly costs push buying out of reach for most people.
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And now, Vieira Jr. said, he has clients who were finally ready to stomach both after three years of waiting for interest rates to fall, but are now pulling back because of volatility in the economy.
Buying a home is a huge investment, said Gillach, in many cases the biggest someone will ever make. It is not difficult to understand, she said, why wild swings in the markets caused by a trade war that may drive up the cost of living would give people pause. With so much in flux — like 401ks and long-term investments — buying a home can go from something that feels like a safe investment to a huge risk.
Real estate agent Rosanne Coric walks through the master bedroom of a home in Newton during a recent open house.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
'I was here for 9/11, and while that was a national tragedy, it had a similar effect, where nobody wanted to make such a major decision because they didn't know what was going to happen in their lives,' said Gillach. 'It's this massive uncertainty that naturally leads to 'I don't know if I want to commit to that house.''
The most vexing part of the housing market's current logjam is that there is no immediate path out of it, said Viera Jr., no indication that interest rates will fall and no sign of prices in Greater Boston going anywhere but up. Now the cost of many building materials is expected to increase, which may push prices even higher.
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'We are looking for a little glimmer of hope, or for the door to be cracked open just a little bit,' said Viera. 'Usually you can find that somewhere with prices or rates. But honestly, the door is not cracked at all right now.'
Andrew Brinker can be reached at
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