December Alone Saw a 16.1% Surge in Sales
The median single-family home sale price in Massachusetts reached a new all-time high by the end of 2024, climbing by 7.9% throughout the year to end December at a record $615,000, real estate market analysts at The Warren Group said Tuesday.
That price represents the median of 42,019 single-family home sales in Massachusetts during 2024, a 2.9% increase over a historically-underwhelming 2023. December’s results ended the year with increases in both number of homes sold and the median price of those homes.
“December alone experienced a 16.1 percent surge in sales compared to December 2023, with 3,657 transactions and a median price of $600,000, another record for the month,” Cassidy Norton, associate publisher of The Warren Group, said.
On the condominium side of the market last year, The Warren Group reported a decline in sales though prices followed a similar trend. There were 18,783 condo sales in 2024, a 2.2% decrease from 2023 and the fewest condo sales for any year since 2011. The year-end median sale price was up 4.9% from 2023 to stand at $535,000, which The Warren Group said is a new all-time high.
The dynamic of chronically-limited inventory and always-escalating prices contributes to making Massachusetts an expensive place to live. State policymakers are counting on a new housing production law to begin to chip away at what is projected to be a 220,000-plus housing unit shortage by 2030.
Once someone is able to overcome the significant hurdles to homeownership in Massachusetts, they are often faced with some of the highest energy prices in the country to keep that home comfortable.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that Boston-area prices for electricity per kilowatt-hour were 73.3% higher than the national average and the average price for a therm of natural gas here was 64.9% higher than the U.S. average as of December. Gasoline prices that averaged $3.188 a gallon in December were “similar” to the national average, BLS said.
