Massachusetts Multi-Family Data going back to 1997 - as of 1/15

[Jonathan Bombaci]

So I am a bit of a data nerd coming from corporate IT Finance world. We had a very hard time getting our hands on Market data that was specific to Multi-family in MA. You know what they say, if you can't find it the build it! Every month we put out a newsletter with updated data and my team leaders have started doing this for each of their markets (Greater Boston, Worcester, Lowell) and are using it at each of our monthly meetups. Below is the write up I did for Total Massachusetts. Please let me know what you think and if you have any questions.

Monthly data through January 2022 for MA in total shows a very strong cyclical market. The big story here is the very apparent lack of inventory in the marketplace. We saw inventory tick up a little bit in going into Q4 last year, then decline rapidly through January 2022. Last year we had a VERY STRONG sellers market and with inventory levels running even lower this year it is setting us up for an even stronger sellers market going into the spring. Looking at the Sold vs List price chart we can see on average listings are selling about 1.5% over asking price while this time in 2021 things we’re selling at about asking price on average. We are seeing some very strong bidding wars in the market place which is atypical this time of year. We are in the process of trying to move our listings scheduled for the spring up to try to take advantage of the current market and, antidotally, we are hearing similar strategies being talked about by other brokerages. We hope this will bring more inventory onto the market and help stabilize the pricing. We expect the spring market to come early and to be very competitive when it does. In fact we are trying to move up the construction timelines on some of our on-going flips so we can try to take advantage of this massive inventory shortage in the marketplace ourselves.

We are keeping an eye on the multi-family inventory in MA very closely and also monitoring the average sale price vs list price so we can provide better guidance to our clients. If we see a sharp increase in inventory this will be a good forward looking indicator that prices may start to soften. Average multi-family listings continue to be at an ALL TIME HIGH. However, based on what we see in the low listing numbers and the very low, less than 1 months of supply, of inventory currently on the market we do not see any indicators in the data to suggest the market will be changing anytime soon.

The Massachusetts Multi-Family Market has seen quite a few changes over the last 24 years. The number of Listings, or Active Inventory, is very low compared to prior years which is driving this very strong sellers market over the last few years. This shortage of inventory is driving the average listing price significantly up. As you can see 2019 was our all time high, in terms of average multi-family listing price and then it dropped in 2020. This was from the impact of COVID on the Greater Boston market. Boston, with it’s high prices, drives the majority of the MA real estate market averages at a state level. When Covid hit the prices in Boston were impacted while the suburbs, 30+ minutes outside of Boston, continued to appreciate. Values have bounced back to and as of December 2021 the average listing price is up over $750,000 (graphs below showing monthly data), making right now the most expensive MA multi-family real estate market of all time.

*This is MULTI-FAMILY specific data pulled directly from the MA MLS, this data does not include any Single Family, Condo, or Commercial properties. It also does not include any properties sold off-market or anything that was not physically listed on MLS as a "Multi-Family".