| 
The Boston housing market may have just set another price record in July, but a new survey from Redfin suggests that bidding wars in the area could be calming down.
Redfin’s real estate agents reported only 10.4 percent of offers they wrote on behalf of clients nationwide faced a bidding war in August, down from more than 42 percent a year earlier.
“Despite remaining near three-year lows, mortgage rates have failed to bring enough buyers to the market to rev up competition for homes this summer,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. “Recession fears have been enough to spook some would-be buyers from making the big financial commitment of a home purchase. But assuming a recession doesn’t arrive this fall or winter, consumers will likely adjust to the new ‘normal’ of continued volatility in the stock and global markets, and the people who need and want to make a move will take advantage of low mortgage rates. As a result, I still expect homebuying competition to pick back up in the new year.”
The San Francisco metro was the most competitive market in August, with 31 percent of offers written by Redfin agents on behalf of their homebuying customers facing a bidding war. But even though that’s more competitive than every other major market in the U.S., the local bidding war rate is down from 73.5 percent a year earlier and down slightly from 31.8 percent in July.
In Boston, only 15 percent of offers written by Redfin agents faced bidding wars in August, down from 18.7 percent in July and 60.1 percent in August 2018.
The study did not disclose the number of offers written by Redfin in the Boston area, nor the number or locations of properties subject to those offers; however, Redfin’s website names 10 buyers’ agents and 12 “partner agents” in the city of Boston, and states the company’s agents closed 2,174 home sales in Greater Boston in the last year. According to data from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, there were 51,522 single-family home and condominium sales in the five-county Greater Boston region from Aug. 1, 2018 to July 31, 2019.
