ProSource Media

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a drastic effect on the rental market in several cities in the United States. Boston is no exception, but if we look at the most recent data and figures from the last 6 months, the rental market in Boston seems to be on a path to recovery. Both the real-time availability rate (RTAR) and real-time vacancy rate (RTVR) have contracted rapidly since last December and that is good news for all the stakeholders in Boston’s rental market. While the RTAR has dropped by -81.72%, there has been a decline of -86.42% in the RTVR when compared to last year. Now, availability of Boston apartments is tighter than it was in December 2019, before COVID rocked the housing market. The YOY average rent price for 1 bedroom and 2 bedroom apartments in Boston has dropped by -3.07% and -0.55% respectively since last year. The pattern is the same outside the city of Boston where the 1 bedroom and 2 bedroom prices have fallen by -2.1% and -0.83%. This is undoubtedly the result of...

  Like most of Metro Boston, real estate prices have been fast on the rise in Somerville.  The median price for single family homes for sale in Somerville MA is $992,652 over the past year.  Even more astonishing is that is has increased by 50% since 2016 when the median sales price was around $600K.  Now Somerville, once a modest blue collar suburb of Boston, is rapidly ascending to be one of Boston’s premier suburban real estate markets. Somerville’s median single family price of $992K ranks 14th highest out of the 33 neighborhoods in Metro Boston.  That rank may not sound impressive, but it is when you consider that only 3 other suburbs rank higher than Somerville on that list:  Brookline ($2.2M), Cambridge ($1.8M), and Newton ($1.59M).  You might think that COVID-19 would have hit these expensive real estate markets the hardest, but it did little to slow down the housing market in Somerville, MA.  Rental data shows that the apartment vacancy ...

  Buying a home in Boston certainly is an expensive venture these days.  Thanks to a steadily growing metro population and a shortage of single family homes for sale in Boston , median sale prices have been steadily rising to the point of absurdity in some neighborhoods.  The median sales price for a single family Boston home is $767K over the past 365 days according to MLS data, and there are 12 neighborhoods where that figure is above $1M.   Prices like that could be discouraging if you’re a prospective home buyer in Boston and budget is a concern, but don’t give up hope.  A deeper dive into the MLS data will show that there are still some neighborhoods where there are single family homes under $500K.  In this article we’ll look at what neighborhoods have the lowest single family median sales prices.  All Boston real estate data provided by Boston Pads. Mattapan Mattapan boasts the lowest median sales price out of all the neighborhoods in Metro Bost...

Boston’s apartment availability percentage has been on a wild ride over the past 24 months.   In October of 2019, apartment availability was near an all-time low at 1.74% following a decade of growing demand for rental units in Greater Boston.   In 2020, it rapidly climbed to its highest level in more than a decade and peaked at 13.43% in March, more than double its cyclical high in March of 2019 (5.56%).   Since then, apartment availability has been in a free fall, and is beginning to flatten at 1.97%, very close to its level in October 2019.   That marks an 87.04% drop in availability rate in just 7 months for Boston apartments . To state the obvious, the pandemic was the main contributing factor in all of this volatility.   But why such a huge swing in both directions?   Boston is no stranger to high apartment turnover. Historically, the availability percentage has fluctuated between 2% and 8% every year, with its peak occurring in March/April and its lo...