Amid a year like no other, where the COVID-19 pandemic delayed, then supercharged the state’s housing market, the number of new listings that hit the market in November tumbled on a month-over-month basis, according to new data from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

But that figure does not portend increased tightness in the market, MAR 2020 President Kurt Thompson said.

“Anecdotally, people typically take their property off the market in the winter if it hadn’t sold,” said Thompson, a broker with Keller Williams Realty - North Central in Leominster.

While the number of new single-family listings that came on the market statewide declined from 6,448 in October to 4,134 in November, the total number of new listings in November is actually up 16 percent year-over-year. And the total number of single-family homes sold through Nov. 30 is up 2 percent compared to the same figure last year according to The Warren Group, Publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

“When you look at the year as a whole, most of the [sales] have recovered – we’ve gotten back to baseline,” Thompson said. “Normally we’d have an inventory base at this time in the year, but the number of transactions has eaten into it.”

Indeed, the speed of transactions has decreased substantially. The average number of days a Massachusetts single-family home that sold in November spent on market was down nearly 42 percent year-over-year, to 28 days. The result has been fewer and fewer homes for sale each month, with only 5,415 on the market in November compared to 6,391 in October and 6,790 in September.

That tightness in the market is fueling higher and higher single-family sales prices – up 25 percent year-over-year statewide in November, according to The Warren Group, to $445,000. A new report from Redfin states 47.6 percent of buyers its agents represented in the Boston area faced bidding wars in November, down from 55.7 percent in October.

With the hot market and record low interest rates, Thompson said, more than a few buyers are becoming less picky about the home they buy, and whether or not it needs additional work.

Buyers, sellers and agents should hold tight until the spring, Thompson said, when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available and releases “a huge surge in inventory.”

“I think we’ll see a decongesting of that pipeline,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of sellers taking advantage of a really hot marketplace.”

Updated: 12:25 p.m. Dec. 16, 2020: This story has been updated to include information from a recently-released Redfin study of bidding wars in November 2020.