After a long and quiet winter, the West End buyers have re-emerged to get the neighborhood real estate market rolling. Over the past couple weeks we’ve seen a number of homes go under contract, including properties on North Beacon, Cone and Elizabeth Streets.
The significant difference between the winter markets in the West End and West Hartford has been interesting to watch. While the West End has been hibernating, homes continued to sell at a rapid rate in West Hartford throughout the winter. There are many factors at work to create this difference and I certainly don’t claim to know them all. Of the factors that I know and am allowed to discuss, my experience has been that buyers for the two markets have different goals.
Folks interested in the West End tend to talk about the unique character of the individual homes and continue their search until they find a property with which they feel a special connection. This attitude is sometimes taken to the extreme and we see buyers patiently waiting years for a particular house to come on the market.
Folks interested in West Hartford are more focused on finding a house with the appropriate statistics (style, bedrooms, bathrooms, …) within a certain timeline. Their top priority is to get into their new home and get established in their new neighborhood. This is not to say that West Hartford buyers care any less about feeling a connection to their homes, just that they tend to have a definite timeline driving their search.
This leads to a question that I always find interesting – what was the most important factor in your most recent (or current) home search?
I would certainly expect to find exceptions to my broad generalizations. In fact, Kyle and I are an exception. Our top priority was timeline, yet we ended up in the West End. We were trying to find a house to move directly into after business school and lucked into our current home.