At the root of this problem: America failed to build enough homes for its growing population. The shortage strikes at the heart of the American dream of homeownership – dampening President Joe Biden’s assurances that the U.S. economy is strong.
With the region already grappling with workforce shortages, a quarter of young professionals living in Greater Boston intend to move elsewhere over the next five years as they navigate their career prospects and housing affordability, a new survey released Monday found.
The housing crisis has gone national, spreading from Boston and a few other blue cities to states and markets across the country. And along the way, it is helping poison the nation’s political mood by deferring or killing the dreams of a generation.
Massachusetts lags behind 40 other states when it comes to increasing its housing stock, a new report said this week, and the pace of new construction last year was just barely ahead of where it was in the depths of the pandemic in 2020.
Consumer prices were up 3.2 percent nationally and 2.8 percent locally for the 12-month period ending with July.
With prices bouncing slightly up or down from day to day or week to week for everyday homes across the state, agents are having a trickier time accurately pricing the listings they’re bringing to market.
Over 100 housing market experts surveyed by listings portal Zillow expect the nation’s median home price to bottom out over the course of this year as buyers’ inability to afford current prices and mortgage rates severely curtails demand.
The number of people between the ages of 20 and 64 in Massachusetts is projected to fall by 120,000 people by 2030, a worrying trend that a leading business group says requires aggressive countermeasures.
Leading housing economists at Fannie Mae now predict that home prices will shrink next year, instead of growing 4.4 percent as they had previously forecast.
A majority of housing economists expect the nation’s housing market to swing “firmly” in buyers’ favor before the end of 2023.
Booms and busts are a natural part of capitalism, but there’s something rather perverse about this particular bust.
Don’t be so happy that Boston’s biotech boom is leading to lots of big-ticket home sales. That same upward pressure on home prices could sour the region on the industry.
Have we reached peak home price craziness yet? For the last decade, the answer from the market has been a resounding “no.” This time could be different.
Skyrocketing home prices across Massachusetts have set off worries about residents getting locked out of homeownership, or worse – a possible future bubble.
U.S. home prices jumped in October by the most in more than six years as a pandemic-fueled buying rush drives the number of available properties for sale to record lows.
Housing prices are rising so fast around the country – “too fast,” as the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors said recently – that they are all but obliterating any gains buyers are seeing from record-low interest rates.
September’s home sales figures confirm this summer’s talk of a sudden intensification of buyers’ interest in the suburbs was no mere passing fancy. But public officials should not take this to mean it’s pointless to build the kind of denser housing we need to beat climate change and our never-ending affordability problems.
U.S. home prices posted a robust gain in August, but according to the Case-Schiller Index Boston isn’t experiencing price jumps like the nation’s hottest markets.
It may be too early to forecast exactly what lies ahead for the housing market once COVID-19 passes into the history books. But at this point, the sector seems poised to retake its place in leading the economy back from the coronavirus-inspired recession.
Despite the uncertain fallout for the housing market, one thing is not likely to change: The Bay State’s dubious title as one of the most expensive places in the country to buy a home or condominium.
