One. Million. Dollars. It’s a phrase best pronounced in the voice of Austin Powers’s nemesis Dr. Evil, and for the first time, it’s also the price of the typical house sold in Greater Boston.
That’s according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, which released June sales data covering most of the region Thursday, with the median price for a single-family house registering just above $1 million. Tipping over into seven digits puts Greater Boston in some rarified air as a true “superstar city,” matching prices typically found only in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Southern California.
What that means for the housing market depends mainly on where you sit, and whether you own a house or aspire to.
“I’ll say it’s a sad thing that it has reached that spot,” said Melvin Vieira Jr., with RE/MAX Real Estate Center and past president of GBAR. “But it’s a good thing that it has reached that spot as well.”
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The number of single-family home sales in June jumped up 19.6 percent from last month, and 5.8 percent year-over-year, with 1,292 sold, according to GBAR’s numbers, which cover most of Greater Boston aside from the North and South shores. Condominium sales rose 1.8 percent year over year, with 986 sold in June.
The million-dollar figure came as little surprise to Dino Confalone of Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty in Cambridge. The local real estate community has been anticipating it for months, he said, with the median single-family home price hovering just below that mark all spring.
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And while unnerving for some, Confalone said, it does reflect well on the area.
“For decades, I’ve said Boston is undervalued,” Confalone said. “You have to pay to play to live here. ... It is a frustrating headline to see for a lot of people, but it’s the brutal reality.”
Boston University economist Adam Guren said Boston has been facing the same challenges as other coastal superstar cities whose housing stock hasn’t kept up with demand, ever since the financial crisis in 2008. The pandemic only drove up prices, he said, then interest rates roughly doubled, and now the cost of construction has soared. Those factors, ”are huge headwinds to building more housing,” he said, “and of course deporting construction workers doesn’t help either.”
For affordable housing advocates like Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing, the million-dollar figure was a milestone, but not one, as he put it, “that anyone really wants to reach.”
“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “There’s so much more we need to do in Greater Boston and across Massachusetts to make sure that we have a Commonwealth that’s affordable and accessible to everyone.”
He said statewide measures like the MBTA Communities Act, which requires communities served by the T to allow multifamily housing, and rules to ease the construction of accessory dwelling units have helped spur a wider range of new housing than just expensive single-family homes. But it’s still not nearly enough to bring down prices.
“There are so many more policy opportunities for us pending on Beacon Hill,” Kanson-Benanav said. “Other cities in America” — like Austin or Charlotte — “invest in expediting permitting and making more varieties of types of homes can be built as-of-right in neighborhoods.”
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Those measures, he said, have led to a sharp increase in supply and stabilization of housing prices.
A big, round number like a million dollars is a major signifier, one that will likely become an easy sound bite on Beacon Hill and in the upcoming Boston mayor’s race. Some advocates hope it will spur state lawmakers to consider policy changes that accelerate new construction in a meaningful way.
“Across income levels, [housing costs are] hurting our businesses, our economy, and our competitiveness, and it tells us we need to take action,” said Rachel Heller, chief executive of Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, a Beacon Hill advocacy group. “This is a solvable problem, and housing is the best investment that we can be making in our state.”
But any new law will take time to result in actual homes that middle-class Massachusetts residents can buy. For people home shopping this summer, the price is steep. But GBAR’s data does show one silver lining: The number of new listings on the market is up 8.9 percent compared with the same month last year, while condos were up 19 percent.
And typically, home prices here peak for the year in June, when the seasonal housing market is at its busiest. Which means, hopefully for some, prices will mellow a bit and dip back below that million-dollar mark. For a little while, anyway.
Janelle Nanos can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @janellenanos.