The average asking price for houses in Brookline right now is $581 a square foot, while in neighboring Newton it’s $443 a foot, according to an analysis from real estate research site NeighborhoodX.
We compare the two because both Green Line-serviced municipalities are often mentioned in the same breath as sales alternatives to neighboring Boston. (And we compared the respective locales’ condo prices recently, besides.)
The range of Brookline house prices right now runs from $386 to $1,377 a square foot; and, for Newton, from $274 to $1,071.
The analysis does come with some caveats, per NeighborhoodX co-founder Constantine Valhouli.
“Our analysis excluded outliers on both side of the price range,” he said in an email. “We excluded properties positioned primarily as development sites, where the value was in the land's potential rather than the building's existing square footage.
“And, on the upper end, we excluded properties with considerable land, where the acreage skewed the apparent value of the built square-footage higher.”
On average, then, house prices in Brookline are about 20 to 25 percent higher than those in Newton on a per-square-foot basis.
That said, according to Valhouli, the most expensive properties in Mattapan ($308 a square foot) are priced higher than the most affordable properties in Newton ($274 a foot).
To put it another way, the most affordable properties in Newton are priced on par with the average properties in Malden ($239 a foot) or Dorchester ($259 a foot).
“From that same analysis, the most expensive properties in Dorchester ($528 a foot) were priced higher than the most affordable properties in Brookline ($386 a foot),” Valhouli said. (Here’s an analysis of housing prices regionally for reference.)
- Brookline vs. Newton condo prices: One’s pricier than the others [Curbed Boston]