Boston condo buyers, sellers, clients, readers, and everybody else…..I am begging you! Please stop quoting what you hear on the national news regarding the real estate market. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that everything that’s on national media outlets is wrong. But when it comes to real estate, national statistics just don’t cut it.
That is unless you think that national media outlets know that your Beacon Hill condo is located on Mt.Vernon Street, or that your friend lives under high tension power lines in Woburn, that your neighbor’s ground floor Boston condo has mold, or that your boss’s Back Bay townhouse was just remodeled from the ground up.
Of course they don’t know that. When you hear statistics that the national home market did xyz, please keep in mind that’s an average across 50 states. It lumps markets in parts of Texas, where $300,000 buys you a 5,000 square foot mansion, in with communities like Back Bay, where $300,000 hardly buys you a parking space. It makes very little sense to even put these statistics together, let alone make your investment decisions based on them.
The real estate market is perhaps more hyper-local than any market in our economy. This means that not only can you not compare a condo in Boston to a condo in Wisconsin but you can’t even accurately compare a condo in Back Bay to one in Brighton, MA.
Actually, it goes further. There are even neighborhoods where you can’t compare one condo to another within the same Boston neighborhood. Take a community like Beacon Hill. Just in my neighborhood alone, there are some condos that are in elevator buildings overlooking the Boston Common like Beacon Street or on Mount Vernon Street. On the other side of the Hill, is Cambridge Street, with city traffic a high student population, bars and nightclubs.
Just from this small example, you should be getting a sense of just how hyper-local real estate can be when even within the same neighborhood. Beacon Hill is only one example of a place with many different types of properties that all demand different prices.
Now imagine the idea of using one number to describe the entire country’s real estate market and you will start laughing at the thought as loudly as I am. Believe it or not, this is why real estate agents still exist (Thank God). There is only so much that computers and national statistics can tell us, and at some point real estate becomes to personal and to human to rely on a newscaster in Washington or NYC telling you what your home in Back Bay is worth.
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Updated: 1st Q 2018
