Hartford County finished 2019 with a single-family sales count in the mid-8,000s for the fourth year in a row. Data from SmartMLS shows that this was a similar activity level to the very early 2000s.
A key difference from the early 2000s is that the extended period of strong sales activity has not resulted in nearly the same amount of price appreciation. The County’s median sales price increased by nearly 9% between 2015 and 2019, but during the early 2000s the median price increased by more than 9% every year.
We like to evaluate the pricing environment once per year in January. This gives us a critical mass of data to mitigate the change in the mix of homes that sell in particular time period, and it also helps address the seasonality of the market by considering a full 12 months.
Our anecdotal impression of the market over the past 12 months was that values have been increasing at the lower price points, and decreasing at the upper price points. There are sophisticated ways to analyze sales data to confidently report on narrow segments of the market. Unfortunately those are not available to us – we have to use the simplistic approach of looking at median price changes.
Hartford County is broken up into dozens of individual municipalities. Below is a chart comparing the median price for each town to the change in median price from 2018 to 2019. This is a rough approximation of the appreciation, or depreciation, by town.
Towns with a median price point of $250,000 or less generally had a higher median sales price in 2019 than in 2018. 12 out of the 14 towns with low median prices saw them increase. We should note that the extreme outlier with the $215,000 median price and the 13.7% decrease in median price is Hartland, which only had 27 sales for the whole year.
Towns with a median price point of $250,000 or more generally had a lower median sales price in 2019 than in 2018. 9 of the 15 towns with high median prices saw them decrease, including the three towns with the highest median price. South Windsor had the strongest median price increase, benefiting from 30 new construction sales that represented more than 9% of the town’s total deals.
The natural differences in price points between towns seemed to illustrate the trends in value that we had observed while working in the market. Lower value homes gained value, while higher value homes lost value.
Below are the results for each individual town in the County. Feel free to contact us for more detailed information on the town, or towns, that interest you.
Super Smart Analysis! Thanks Amy!