Here's the latest installment of Bates By the Numbers, a weekly feature by Boston real estate agent David Bates that drills down into the Hub's housing market to uncover those trends you would not otherwise see. Check out his ebook, Context: Nine Key Condo Markets.
Hub condo sales are up 23 percent in the first 11 months of the year compared to the same time period in 2009. That's good. In the same comparative dates, however, sales tags totaling over $1 million have more than doubled. That's great!
While Boston's most popular million-dollar condo markets have shown solid sales increases in transaction counts in recent years, it's the meteoric increases in three particular Boston markets that have driven the total sales increase.
The first market, Midtown, was once a million-dollar one primarily fueled by Ritz-Carlton condo sales. In 2009, Ritz condos comprised six of the seven total Midtown million-plus sales. Then new construction changed the Midtown million-plus landscape. Of 56 million-plus sales in the first 11 months of 2013, only about one-third (18) were at the Ritz. Fifteen million-plus sales have already been recorded at the newly opened Millennium Place; and 45 Province, with 19 such trades, was Midtown's million-plus sales leader for the first 11 months of 2013.
Like Midtown, the South End is also one of the most changed Hub neighborhoods for million-dollar condo sales, producing more than twice as many million-dollar transactions as it did in 2011, and around two and a half times as many as in 2009. In 2013 so far, one out of every four South End condo sales has closed at more than $1 million, a very high ratio, though not as high as Back Bay, Boston's most prolific million-dollar condo market, where 40 percent of 2013's sales have topped $1 million. Unlike Midtown, however, there are no large buildings that dominate the South End's million-plus market. Instead, dozens of different addresses make up the 121 transactions that surpassed the million-dollar mark in the first 11 months of the year.
Charlestown is a significantly smaller million-plus market, though one that has seen an outpouring of million-plus sales in 2013. In the first 11 months of 2009, only one Charlestown condo was able to reach this sales-price milestone. This year, however, there have been 24 million-plus sales in Charlestown, half of which were for newly constructed townhouses at the corner of Warren and Park.
The only price niche that seems to be growing faster than million-plus sales are the sales of even more expensive Hub condos. Compared to the first 11 months of 2009, $2 million-plus sales are up 138 percent, while $3 million-plus sales are up 243 percent and $4 million-plus sales are up a staggering 450 percent.
· Our Bates By the Numbers archive [Curbed Boston]
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