Just the ugliest house you’ve ever seen, in Falmouth. No recent upgrades. Just doubles in price in five years, huge interest rates be damned. This is just insane. /rant

Redfin? Those estimates are garbage.

Cape cod... get the fuck out heeeeerreeeeeee

So no one is going to mention that this can be related to covid? That the massive shutdown of the economy for over a year had nothing to do with this. People were not moving and were staying in place. All those who did need/want to move were battling over the low inventory.

Many people who did not want to invest in the market were scooping up properties to park their money. Cash payer were getting properties over mortgages.

Now everyone is in a quagmire where while selling prices are high, they would need to spend that plus more to move. There were/are people willing to pay over asking by 10's of thousands for homes that did not merit this. Until the housing market calms down, and people can afford to buy/sell no one is going to move. Now with interest being so high, these high prices are not affordable. This may take some time, and the coming recession is not going to help either

I’d like to see further back on the x-axis. Also, vacation zones got real expensive during the pandemic due to work from home and people trying to relocate permanently to where they like to vacation.

As much as I think remote work is here to stay to a certain extent, I think it will get dialed back. And the cape is one of the few parts of the state that can swing boom or bust (as opposed to boom and ‘maybe slow down a little’). If trying to buy a vacation house, I’d wait. If trying to stop paying crazy rent and get into owning: kinda stinks either way right now

It sucks soo bad. Current options are to keep paying almost 3k in rent a month, or buy a seriously over inflated in price, also at like 8% interest. I’m having fun, are you having fun?

It's insanely depressing.

What goes up must come down, I hope.

We could solve this pretty easily. Allow new construction of higher density housing.

All the “Stop the Weston Whopper” people have guaranteed that their kids will all leave the area because a starter home is $600K.

If remote work is dialed back, housing near the commuter rail will go parabolic.

In RI, we are already seeing housing prices grow as people squeezed out of Mass migrate west and south but still within commuting distance.

In Weston, $600k is a teardown.

watch 'Sachs Realty' on YouTube - he says prices are going down already and will go down (although maybe not in the Northeast), because everyone is SPENDING too much in general and people can't afford this, or to repair and keep up the huge houses they bought. So in 3 years we will have a repeat of 2008, it is just starting now though. Personally, I would wait for this house to do price drops and then offer $250,000 and put in $100,000 in repairs to make functionable - https://www.redfin.com/MA/Attleboro/25-Dailey-St-02703/home/15969095 Then you have a house for $350,000 near two high ways..

I was thinking more of a theoretical condo that they still won’t allow to be built 😁

And am also thinking of the larger Boston Metro; young people simply cannot afford these prices and they will leave.

Exactly why my husband and I stopped searching. I feel your pain.

My SO and I are in the same exact situation. Both struggling to save between rent, student loans, utilities, and everything else...

Not sure how the fuck we are supposed to save up 30 grand to put down on a house. Just feels so fucking impossible

Yeah my grandma is really confused why I bought a house in springfield when all of my family is on the south coast. Meanwhile, she voted to limit new housing construction.......

Years ago, I lived in Braintree and the NIMBYs were intolerable. At one session opposing high density housing development near the T Stop, some imbecile described Braintree as a “rural community that shouldn’t be developed.” Yeah. A rural community with a major subway stop, commuter rail hub, interstate connector/intersection, ginormous shopping mall and a couple commuter rail stations.

And the worst part was when she said “we need to save the town for the people who live here and our children.” Imagine if someone had told her that when she wanted to have her house built in 1982.

I understand that the state has since stepped in and mandated higher density zoning near all commuter rail stops, but I’m not holding my breath for affordable housing to appear.

Damn, we bought in 2021 and that was pretty bad. I thought the market was cooling?

I happily anticipate the hard landing.

it will fall at least 10-20%, rentals are already offering 1-3 free months in order to not drop their monthly rates in their reports to their investors.

Same. Our household income is $120k, yet we're still struggling to save between price gouging, 3k rent, etc. We have decent savings, but we can't grow it to keep pace with the 10% needed for down-payment. I got outbid on so many properties by $50k each time early on during the pandemic that we basically gave up. Hoping we can snag a condo, this year because our landlord's trying to get rid of us to renovate and we really don't want to rent anymore.

My husband and I bought our house a little over 2 years ago and it’s increased in value almost $100K for no reason at all. Our friends can’t find anything even remotely comparable to what we bought our house for and they’re better off than we are… it’s just super unfortunate

It is most certainly not.

Agreed

They really aren't too bad

Protest your local zoning board — they’re filled with geriatric know-nothings who’ve created this hellscape for the rest of us.

Nothing to do with current really but simply maybe steeper currently? Houses always cost more year after year. Look at the timeline for MA housing costs since 1980. Buying a house is one of the best investments you'll ever make as it has always risen. I was lucky to get into mine in 2000 saw it rise to the 2008 Great Recession and then dip but recover and is what it is today with estimates of three times what I paid for it common. I'm not selling though as my mortgage payment is much less than what I see in rental adverts for similar or smaller. It certainly is daunting.

After 23 years here, people say the same thing almost every year. They aren't making any more land unfortunately.

>So in 3 years we will have a repeat of 2008

Why? Seriously why? Will everyone need to sell at the same time and nobody will want to buy?

Its different now. Any house that's nice gets an offer within a day or 2. Everything else is super outdated will require a lot of work. But also inventory is ridiculously low.

Don’t worry it will get much worse, all you have to do is wait!

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/jan/16/oxfam-calls-for-new-taxes-on-super-rich-pocket-dollar-26tn-start-of-pandemic-davos

“Call for new taxes on super-rich after 1% pocket two-thirds of all new wealth $26tn of new wealth created since start of pandemic went to richest, Oxfam report reveals”

Our hack was to buy into a new construction condo development but there are risks - you get a general sense of layout etc but the builder and architect reserve the right to change anything. The good news is that if you buy pre- construction pricing you build equity right off the bat bc they just raise prices after the condo is actually built.. crazy what we have to do for housing here

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Not to mention that with just 30k down, that puts you within reach of purchasing a property worth 150k, since anything less than 20% forces you into extra PMI payments, which also slows down your loan processing, which delays the closing more than just securing financing. And then there's the reality that most places you put in an offer on, if someone offers the same amount with cash, the seller will almost always go with that due to not having the sale having to be contingent on securing financing at all.

It truly is unfair at every turn.

How did you find something like this?

But every time a housing development gets discussed a giant army of NIMBYs get enraged and nothing gets done. Developments end up being stupid fucking strip malls, fancy grocery stores, not giant apartment buildings. This contingent needs to get fought at the state level before this problem gets any better. Think of the GDP growth Mass is missing out on! Imagine how many more people would move to MA if housing wasn’t a total disaster!

The housing market is nuts. I cashed out on my house outside of Boston in 2022. Literally just bought a house out in Western Mass, I work remotely and it's close enough to occasionally come in.

The cheapest property on Zillow in Weston is $1.25m.

Says a 52 min commute to my office, 2 hours if I want to try transit.

Fwiw there’s much better cape towns to live in than Falmouth

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That's the point.

Which? I like the walkability from the beach to downtown and ferry access to MV.

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Eastern MA is the worst. It’s unbelievable how unaffordable it is.

Thank your local NIMBY. There is a reason the only development in Falmouth is 40b.

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Is that the chart for my property taxes? Looks about the same....

We lost out on more than one house where the seller took a lower cash offer than what we offered. I hope the two weeks they saved was worth the 10k they lost.

PMI shouldnt be a dealbreaker imo

We bought our house 2 years ago with 5% down and PMI is only ~$80 a month and only applies until you have at least 20% in equity IIRC

20% of our purchase price would be $44k. We paid $11k instead, and PMI costs is roughly $1k a year. It’ll be off of our payments well before it’s adverse

> PMI should be a dealbreaker imo

I think you meant "shouldn't"

Correct, I’ve since edited that mistake. Thanks for pointing it out

So many selfish old people ruining this planet

Prices spiraled because interest rates were so low for so long. Thank the fed for that. In trying to prop up banks, they inflated the heck out of the housing market.

>So many selfish old people ruining this planet

I hate this, but more and more I'm feeling it's true. Luckily we bought a house in 2017. We paid about 350k, and is probably work about 550K, based on recent sales. I think that's insane!

I was talking with an older co worker and she was dumbfounded why I was dismayed by this. I don't want houses to be unaffordable for people, even though I already have one. Their "I got mine, so screw everyone else" attitude drives me nuts.

We bought our 3 bedroom, 1 bath, small lot, 1920's house in late 2000. For under 100k. Current value is just under 300k. I mean we've made some large updates. New roof, Electric brought up to modern code. But there's no way in hell we could do it now.

Same time line for me - Zillow says we are down 1%, Redfin says up 2%

This is an outlier example though of a high-end second home community. In my town, which admittedly is less desirable, home values peaked 6+ months ago. At this point, they're at most 10 - 15% over 2018 prices. That's still a lot but it's at pace with overall inflation. And we very clearly haven't hit the bottom yet, as anything that isn't in pristine condition is sitting with multiple price drops.

My house (in Massachusetts) hasn’t doubled in the last 5 years. Maybe you should look in a different town?

Sachs Realty has been saying housing prices are going to go down every month for almost a year now

I disagree respectfully. The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the short-term rental market and work from home people. Nobody ever talks about how much of the inventory that used to be up for year-round renters has been gobbled up by want to be hotel entrepreneurs. How many people own more than one house just in Massachusetts alone? I personally have an aunt and uncle who have no less than three properties up in Quincy Mass and they've owned them for years. In my aunt and uncle are working class people who just found shitty buildings and fix them up and rented them out when the getting was good. How many other Boomers have done the same? Thousands and thousands. It's not lack of supply it's the fact that people are hoarding and holding on to real estate for dear life.

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Yup. I live in a gateway city in Mass, and this 3 floor tenement down the block from me is for sale once again. I am sure some work was done on it to improve it's value during this time, but no matter how much they did to improve it, it's still outrageous how much it's gone up in a relatively short period of time. Check out this sales history:

1999 $155,000
2015 $136,000
(clearly shows signs of being in need of a lot of work, that's fine, but now the fun begins...)
2017 $305,000
2019 $390,000
2021 $560,000

Now it's listed for sale for $699,000. Not sure about the rest of you, but my current salary compared to 2015 isn't that much different. But these home prices sure are!

I just sold my 2 BR, 800 square foot condo for 150k, which I bought in 2018 for 80k. My girlfriend and I are now in the process of buying a home with our combined savings. Are there any projections that the cost of housing will go down anytime soon? Please advise. Our market is Mansfield, MA

Anyone want to hop on a referendum to make owning more than 10 for-profit properties in Massachusetts illegal?

We could solve it without having to build high-density shithole apartments by making it illegal to own more than 10 for-profit properties in Massachusetts

The supply keeps going down because real estate companies are purchasing more and more of the available homes.

Forget the dudes with 3 apartments. Boston Properties, Alexandria Real Estate, and Tishman Speyer each own 20 billion dollars in private property in the greater Boston area.

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I’ll at least say this. Just because Zillow, Redfin, and other sites say your home value has gone up doesn’t mean it will actually sell at that price. Our home value went up a year after we bought it. We made a small profit but not anywhere near the estimate.

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They don't sit empty, they sit rented.

>These companies are doing nothing more than taking advantage of the supply shortage.

Which is exactly why we need more regulation to stop encouraging housing as a commodity.

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Since 2019 the population has increased by roughly a 1/10 of a percent, yet property values are more than double? There are more than enough homes/apartments in Massachusetts.

>Are you suggesting that I, as a homeowner, should be capped on how much I can sell my home for?

I am suggesting making it illegal to own more than a set number of properties that exist for profit in Massachusetts. If you don't explicitly live in the building it counts towards that number. Those people/companies that own more than that number would have a set amount of time to unload their properties before being fined. I also want a complete ban on any foreign company owning property that they do no reside in.

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You're probably right - they are wishy washy about their predictions, but their content is reasonable in my opinion. Hey, at least they aren't as bad as Peter Shiff saying buy gold because housing is a bad investment in 2010, which was the best time to invest in it.

Choose the Red pill or the Blue pill.

They just built 10 giant apartment complexes in downtown Beverly. Since then, rent has at least doubled. Most of those apartments sit empty but they are all owned by the same company so they can just charge whatever they want.

If 5 companies build a million apartments they still will control the cost of housing, regardless of supply and demand. Which, ironically is the problem with oil as well.

It's time for housing to no longer be a commodity.

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It’s not about time saved, it’s about taking the offer that it guaranteed to close. Sellers worry about buyers not being able to get approved for a mortgage and the deal falling through.

But houses that need lots of work is where you can build equity. I don’t understand everyone wanting to start off with a turn key home. Buy a fixer upper and start from there.

Check North Attleboro/Attleboro. I wanted Mansfield, Foxborough, Easton when looking in 2020 but Attleboro was the winner on prices 😅 brand new high school, a lot of new sidewalks being put in for accessibility, etc.

Here come another crash…

It can easily go down too. It goes both ways. Very risky

On Rantoul st you have: the Flats at 131, link 480, Beverly crossing, station 101, Holmes Beverly, canvas apartments, enterprise apartments, and Sedna all built within 1000 yards of each other in the last 10 years, half of them within the last 3. In 2019 I lived in a 1 BR for $1300. They now rent that same unit out for $2000. Every single one of those buildings have vacancy, just check their websites.

In 2015 (before any of these went up) average rent for a 2br was $1250 a month. As of right now a 2 br is around $2800 a month.

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/beverly-ma

While inflation plays a small part of this, about 25%, the real driver of this is:

1. Everyone wants to live in Massachusetts (because its awesome)
2. The people who are here and OWN their land don't want to build new housing, anywhere. There are no towns that I am aware of who want TONS of new buildings and high-rises.

So, the limited housing becomes an auction. Highest bidder wins. The people who are buying have lots of money. This state is attracting rich people, typically highly educated in lucrative professions. And those people who bought something don't really want the prices to drop. They just made a big investment, and rising prices help them. Further, just building a ton of new buildings will just make traffic worse.

There is no solution. Conceivably the legislature could force more construction on local towns, but that won't work for long because homeowners all over the state don't want more construction in their towns. "Small towns are part of the charm of Massachusetts!" People who own, and have fixed mortgages WANT the prices to go up.

It sucks, its not getting worse. And its all mostly because Massachusetts is great: great education, great healthcare, great environment... For those who have a house, they don't care about the people who say "but I cannot afford to live here!" that's someone else's problem.

It only really becomes a home owner's problem when they cannot afford someone to provide cheap services for them.

High density isn’t “shithole.” High density is highly desirable. Sprawling McMansions in car-dependent strip-mall suburbs are often the real shitholes.

Yeah, I've seen the prices are much more fair and reasonable and within our range...we can get a lot more for our money from Attleboro/North Attleboro...but my girlfriend is committed to Mansfield because she doesn't want to take her daughter (8 years old) out of Mansfield school system and away from her friends :/ tricky situation but maybe she will see its worth the brief growing pains

Ok but that's the other end of the spectrum. What I'm saying is there is so much fucking housing but it's all owned by billionaire real estate trusts.

I don’t think there’s much housing in New England. Certainly not enough has been built to handle population growth in MA; eastern Mass has added over a million residents in the past 20 years but almost no new housing in that same time period.

According to this chart, this is the first time I have ever bought the dip. Until the dip is redefined that is.

We bought in Jan 2020 and moved in the literal week that everything went into quarantine in March. Our house has gone up over 100k since then. We couldn’t have afforded it today. We feel really lucky but it’s awful for everyone as a whole.

Mathematically, on a 500k house with 300k in interest over 30 years you’re better off than paying rent at $36,000 per year for a total of $1,080,000 without a house at the end to show for it.

this will reverse in a few years when the high interest rate works through the system.

Seems to me right now only people who can afford to buy are people within the bubble. they trade up with a low interest mortgage (which are gone now) and hope to capitalize on appreciation.

but if there's a variable mortgage involved or they need to sell they're screwed.

correct me if i'm wrong please

Can you tell us your source? There isn't a lot of information on that graph.

It’s almost as if property taxes derive from property values 😂

2% interest rates may have been needed in areas of the country hit hard by Covid, but they destroyed the housing market in places like Massachusetts with serious housing shortages and high rents where most of the jobs kept right on trucking and just moved to work from home. There was a 2 fold effect. First off, since there aren’t now and haven’t been for years as many single family homes as there are people who want to buy them, the bidding wars we’ve been seeing on every decent house for the last 20 years spiked up because people could suddenly spend more money and keep the same monthly payment. And secondly with the housing market booming and rents remaining high it became almost a no brained for middle aged people with enough liquid retirement money to put down 20% to outbid young people trying to buy starter homes by offering “all cash” (they were actually taking out mortgages but had enough economic stability and extra funds available that they didn’t need mortgage contingencies on their offers) for the condos those young people should have been buying and then renting them back to the same people at rents so high they were making more money off that 20% down after paying their mortgage, any upkeep and hiring a property manager to take care of their tenants to do way better than they would have done if they left that money in stocks. It’s an awful situation that we will be feeling the effects of for a generation.

The house prices are nuts! I wonder how first time buyers do it..The houses were selling so fast. There are not that many good paying jobs round so how people coming up with half million for A nothing special ild home ? Every thing has gone up crazy!! food prices eggs $5 dozz ??? electric bill! it is crazy!!!

Its just some local home’s redfin valuation over the years

No way! Is that how that works????? /s

What is shitty is that these house values have been hyper inflated to values that just are not true. My house went from 300k to 450k in less than two years. It isn't worth that. I am sure the value will sharply decline to its actual value again, but I am positive that town won't be so sharply declining my taxes with it.

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that will make condos and townhouses cheaper for sure. But single family homes will always be outrageously priced

Our realtor was with the same firm as the sellers agent. Most people working in real estate know each other - its a small club here grouped by town/ neighborhood you are searching in. Everyone is also less than competent because the market here is always so strong despite recessions - you can look at real estate data locally online and instead of dipping in 2008 like most major cities boston kind of remained flat on the whole.

after a few months of searching for single families and getting outbid, we had told our agent we were done. He mentioned the building was breaking ground to me anyways, and was doing pre-construction financing to help with costs and also make the case to the developers’ bank that people would buy in (were in metro bosto so I’m sure that wasn’t hard) Buying in early meant we wouldn’t deal with a bidding war or having to write letters to owners to convince them to pick us, which made us uncomfortable as POC. The risks to us were construction delays, losing our mortgage approval bc of getting timed out or job loss etc., or the building going under for whatever reason. We would be out our 10% deposit in that case which for us was already was less than the cost of “bidding” for a single family if that makes sense

You can also stalk city zoning boards and city council meetings for updates on new zoning approvals for buildings. More work obviously but the info is all out there for the taking - hope this helps!! Sorry for the novel lol

>work from home people.

Yo, leave us out of this, we have no impact on the housing market.

>How many people own more than one house just in Massachusetts alone?

Nowhere near as many as you think.

Median sale price was just under 700K in Falmouth in recent data even with astronomical mortgage rates. It's also important to note that we have created an incredible amount of money + wealth in financial assets in the last 10 yrs. Even with the recent bear market in growth stocks, Apple was trading below $20 a share in 2013 and is now 130ish after having spiked all the way to $180 in 2021 The S&P 500 has more than tripled since the low in 2012. So when put in context, I'm not very surprised that houses have gone way up in nominal terms.

The people who have truly been f---ed over, are the people who have been making the same income for the past 10 yrs without promotions or wage increases and benefits largely unchanged. Folks living hand-to-mouth also have very little participation in financial assets like stocks/real estate, so this is truly a triple whammy when you also factor in COL increases due to food/energy/rent.

Thank goodness for places like Belmont -- SFHs within shouting distance of Boston!

We can build the homes we need without high rises. We can build the homes we need without giant box apartment buildings. Has anyone ever walked around the South End with the brick row homes, or the upper west side in manhattan, and thought it was ugly?

​

People fetishize neighborhoods like that, but they are illegal. Illegal, illegal, illegal.

Wrong.

It is a quandary! We moved from Colorado with a good pay increase for both my wife and I only to see that disappear because rent is twice what we paid in Colorado, utilities cost more as well. Looked into buying a house but prices for a nice property are through the roof. We have seen prices come down a bit but interest rates make it impossible.

Colorado will be back in our future!

Define "not true." If people are paying these prices, then the prices are...real.

I know you're probably saying that mostly in jest but its seriously crushing my mental health its fucking awful

I completely understand. Same here. It's devastating

That comment isn't accurate. Ive been looking at everything under 550 and Ive seen plenty of places that are super rough in Middlesex country that are 500-550 where there are like 30 people at the open house and it goes way over asking in a day. Id be happy to buy a house that needs some elbow grease to make nice but the options out there are like buy something under 600k that has major structural flaws you can't afford to repair or move out west and have a 2 hour commute or just continue getting outbid by contractors and investors who will either tear down or flip these places because they actually have the cash

I understand what you mean. If someone is willing to pay a price for something, then it must be worth that. I believe that the value of the housing market will tumble back down. The way I feel is that if my house shot up to 450k from 300k, but falls right back down to 300k, it wasn't really worth 450k. To someone it was, but those prices were hyper inflated for a short period of time. I would just hope my taxes reflect my lower home value when it falls back down.

Look at the 5 year valuation on any house in eastern MA on Redfin and you'll see a very similar trend

What is wrong with you?

Nothing happened in 2019 other than a pandemic where you got fleeced by people with money

So stupid to read this crap over and over. Houses doubled because they could. Because you’re fleeced. Not because all of the sudden some massive change in space or inventory because of “nimby” occurring 🙄 so stupid lmao

Who said anything about 2019?

The housing market has been bananas much longer than that.

Not exactly a growing state.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-losing-population

Correct. It's not growing because we have somewhat fixed housing.

We moved from Durango! Also doubled salary, but doubled rent cost as well. I spent 10 years in Florida and lived in 4 different cities, never paid more than $825 for a 2/2 unit, looking at rent prices in Florida now is mind blowing. Everywhere seems like a wash for renting, and the last couple years of home rush, has really disrupted things.

So not everyone wants to live here.

Stagnant population yet housing still goes up. There are other factors

Not necessarily. Greater density can also result in more single family houses if street offsets and minimum house/lot sizes are reduced.

Colorado is still pretty good! We are finding homes in Colorado Springs in our former neighborhood for 430k 2700 sq ft nice quiet neighborhood.

Looked at 3 BR apartments as well and see places for over $1000 less that what we pay. In fact we found a 3300 ft house for 2500. 5 BR as well so Colorado is where we will go with in the year.

I grew up in MA, but moved away after college. My parents are getting older now and starting to have some health problems and I'd like to be closer to them, but MA is completely unaffordable now. I honestly don't know how you're all surviving. A comparable townhouse to what I currently have costs more than double.

I blame the buyers. The fed is trying to help with the increased interest rates, but demand is way too strong. If you want sellers to respect you, hold out!