connecticut’s housing market hit new high in 2020, report says
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By Joseph De Avila | Published on February 2, 2021
Home buyers purchased the most homes in Connecticut in 15 years in 2020, propelling median-sale prices to a record high, according to a new report.
There were 38,641 single-family home sales in the state in 2020, a 16.6% jump from the prior year, according to the Warren Group, a real-estate research firm. That was the most Connecticut home sales since 2005.
Median sales prices also rose to $300,000 in 2020, a 15.4% increase from the prior year and the highest price on record in the state.
The state’s housing market benefited from low-interest rates, growing demand for second homes and the ability of white-collar workers to work remotely amid the pandemic, giving those workers more options to choose where to live, said Timothy Warren, chief executive of the Warren Group.
In the New York City suburbs of Fairfield County, sales volume for single-family homes rose by nearly 27%, and the median sales price hit $540,000, a 22.7% increase from the prior year.
Connecticut’s strong performance surpassed Massachusetts in terms of growth for both sales volume and median-sale prices, Mr. Warren said.
“It was a remarkable turnaround because the real-estate market has been essentially flat since the Great Recession,” he said.
The strong housing market is a welcome change for the state where median home-sale prices have languished since the collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing 2007-2009 recession. The state’s population also has been slowly shrinking since 2014 and has a population of 3.56 million as of July 2020, according to the U.S. Census.
The weak housing market and lack of population growth compounded economic challenges for the state, which still hasn’t recovered all the jobs it lost from the last recession. Connecticut also has an unemployment rate of 8% compared with the national rate of 6.7%.
Don Klepper-Smith, chief economist at research firm DataCore Partners, said Connecticut’s underlying economic challenges are likely to continue. But in the short term, the state will benefit from the strong demand for Connecticut homes as more people are likely to expedite plans to move to the suburbs as the pandemic continues, he said.
“The 2020 numbers were nothing short of stellar,” Mr. Klepper-Smith said. “I see another good year for housing” in 2021, he added.
Single-family home sales were robust throughout Connecticut in 2020 compared with the prior year. Sales volume was up nearly 30% in Litchfield County, which borders New York state, and nearly 19% in Tolland County, bordering Massachusetts—two of the more rural regions in the state.