Zillow: Metro Boston is facing the worst inventory crunch in the US

Plus, forty-nine percent of the listings sold for over the asking price in March; back in 2019, that figure was only 26%.

Zillow’s new Housing Market Report suggests that prospective home buyers in the Boston area may face a Spring House Hunt as exasperating as the cool temperatures that rolled in last night.

The online real estate marketplace reported that buyers here are encountering a market in which roughly half of the homes are selling for more than their listing price: Forty-nine percent of the listings sold for over the asking price in March; back in 2019, that figure was only 26%.

The above-list price number was also high for Providence (47%) and Worcester (43.7%).

Homes are also spending less time on the market: They are listed for only seven days on average before someone snaps them up, which is two days faster than before the pandemic, according to the report.

Meanwhile, inventory here is lower than anywhere else in the United States, and residential property values are still increasing, according to the report.

The news comes after home prices in Greater Boston set records in March.

“Not surprisingly, Massachusetts median single-family home prices continued to set records in March,” Cassidy Norton, associate publisher and media relations director for The Warren Group, said in the data analytics firm’s monthly market report. “Despite the increase, we actually aren’t seeing the rapid, double-digit percent increases [in Massachusetts overall] we were experiencing at the height of the pandemic and the subsequent months. Despite this slowdown, limited inventory will probably continue to be the biggest barrier to homeownership in the coming months.”

Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, said in the report that “seasonal price appreciation” is ramping up quicker in the most expensive metro areas compared with other markets. Annual price gains, the report said, are higher in the Boston area (at 9.5% year over year) than in all but three cities: Hartford, San Diego, and San Jose. The Zillow Home Value Index for Boston proper is $741,153 (a 3.7% year-over-year increase) and it’s $688,702 (a 9.5% increase) for metro Boston, which extends into southern New Hampshire. Compare that with a national figure: $356,000.

New construction is providing buyers some relief in Southern metro areas such as New Orleans and Austin, Olsen wrote.

But the Boston area isn’t seeing the same inventory boost, according to the report: Of all markets in the United States, metro Boston experienced the greatest drop in new listings, which fell by 17.2% from March 2023 to March 2024.

Melvin A. Vieira Jr., a former president of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors and a realtor with RE/Max Destiny in Boston, told Boston.com earlier this week that the low inventory and high prices may stick around for a while.

“Until they change the way zoning is regulated (a lot of zoning is still stuck in the 1950s) and transportation is fixed, we will be here for a while,” Vieira said.