Boston Median Home Price Hits $1M Threshold for First Time

For the first time, the median price of a home in the Greater Boston area has reached a seven-figure sum.

The Greater Boston Association of Realtors revealed the median price for a single-family home in the market last month hit $1 million, Axios reported. The market’s been trending towards that benchmark for the past three months.

“If you needed any more evidence that Greater Boston was one of the most desirable areas of the country to live, you just got it,” GBAR president Mark Triglione said in a statement.

Boston’s market favors sellers, even though homes are hanging up in the marketplace for a longer period of time than a few months prior. The homebuyer hope of diminishing prices has yet to materialize.

That’s not the case in the condo market. The median price of a condo in the market dropped to $725,000 last month, a 3.3 percent decline from the previous month. It was also down from last year.

Still, there’s a chorus of industry experts fearful that Boston is not keeping up with affordable house production and is forcing out a significant number of its residents.

“Boston is no longer for the people we serve,” Symone Crawford, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Homeownership Alliance, told the publication.

For a median-priced home, a family would likely need a roughly $200,000 down payment, excluding other considerations such as closing costs, HOA fees, utility bills and repair expenses. That’s more than double the city’s median household income in 2023.

Renters are burdened, too. Approximately half of the city’s tenants spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, the recommended ceiling for renters. A quarter of the city’s tenants spend at least half of their income on rent.

“Production across all price points is the only solution in Greater Boston to satisfy demand and bring down overall costs,” Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty agent Dino Confalone told Axios.

Home prices are soaring across the country. The median U.S. home sale price soared to an all-time high of $396,500 during the four weeks ending June 15, according to Redfin.

— Holden Walter-Warner