Strained relations among neighbors
Going gets tougher for sellers on the fringe of wealthy communities
Maybe it was the freakishly mild weather, but open houses in Wellesley last Sunday were more crowded than they been in months - one drew 42 people, according to its broker.
Meanwhile, homes in nearby communities, which once enjoyed the kind of demand Wellesley gets, go begging.
Such is the fate of communities that grew in demand and stature when traditional tony suburbs became increasingly unaffordable and the high waters of the housing market washed westward. With the economy rapidly retrenching, the real estate markets in these communities founder, while the Wellesleys and Westons of Massachusetts resemble islands of safety.
"For a long time, inventory was so low, builders would build houses in other towns, and these would sell, always priced a little less than the blue-chip towns," said Concord real estate agent Brigitte Senkler, who has worked in the area for more than 20 years. "But nowadays, people would rather invest in a stable town, even if the price is more. They're concerned if they buy elsewhere, prices will deteriorate."
Just compare Weston and Wayland. In ultrarich Weston, the median sales price of a single-family home sold last year climbed 7.5 percent, to $1.3 million. In neighboring Wayland, home prices dropped a whopping 20 percent, to a median of $505,000.
Jeff Morgenstern, a Coldwell Banker manager in Wayland, said a soft real estate climate is making Weston, Wellesley, and Newton more accessible. Ironically, the result is a concentration of demand that has pushed some home prices up in those communities.
"The market in Wellesley and Newton becoming so overpriced is what created the million-dollar market in Wayland," he said. "Now it's easier to buy in those places, so people give less consideration to the high-end in Wayland."
Other agents noted that in a market like this, the neighboring communities suffer in comparison to the blue-chip towns: The school systems suddenly don't look as strong, the underdeveloped town centers less inviting.
What is selling in Wayland, however, are mid- and lower-price homes. That could suggest a kind of ripple effect underway: As more upper-income home shoppers find the Westons more affordable, middle-income buyers find the Waylands of Massachusetts are finally accessible to them. Wayland, after all, is still a beautiful quintessential New England town and its schools enjoy a strong reputation.
But what suffers in this demographic market shift are the high-end homes, particularly new construction.
The suburban area facing the biggest challenge now may be the cluster of towns around the western loop of Interstate 495, where high-end properties are a tough sell. New construction in Harvard, Westford, Bolton, Westborough, and others helped turn once-sleepy rural towns into the newest hot suburbs for white-collar workers from the nearby tech and biomedical belts.
At the peak of the real estate boom in 2005, the median price for a single-family home in Westborough had jumped to $520,000, buoyed by the sale of palatial homes in newly cut subdivisions. Prices have since plunged, last year to a median of $370,000. In Westford, the median price dropped last year nearly 16 percent, with sales declining by nearly 30 percent.
The "Castle in the Woods," as its marketing brochure describes it, is a 5,500-square-foot house in Bolton built in 2000 on 2.6 acres, that has been on and off the market for more than two years. First listed at around $2 million, the seller has since dropped the price to $1.29 million.
"Eight to 10 years ago, these things were hot," said Daphne Cassin, an agent with TP Hazel Sotheby's International Realty, during a recent tour of the home. Now, she added, the seller "knows he might not recoup the amount of money he put into the house."
In another subdivision a few minutes away, adjacent to the International golf course, where members of the New England Patriots are known to play, agent Sandra Naroian points out that lots are selling for $250,000; a few years ago they fetched $400,000. Naroian, a broker with Keller Williams Realty, has been trying to sell a million dollar house - with a poolside waterfall - for nine months.
Naroian said that there is still a market for such homes; it's just a matter of sellers coming down far enough. "People are going to be able see good deals from miles away," she said, noting that a house in another exclusive section of town that had been priced around $1.6 million recently sold for just under $1 million.
In discussing which of these outlying communities has been hardest hit, real estate agents tend to point to the next town over. Among those with the most severe drop is Westford, where the median home price declined nearly 16 percent in 2008, to $420,000, and sales volume declined by nearly 30 percent.
It's a different story five minutes over in Carlisle. Here the median home price rose last year by 4.5 percent, to $760,000.
Last Sunday, Ross Capobianco was one of six people viewing a 4,500-square-foot colonial that went on the market a few weeks ago for $1.23 million.
"Prices are still high," said Capobianco, who now lives in Bedford and is hoping to find a larger house for his family. "In less affluent areas, they have to sell. At the higher end, it's hard for them to come down too far."
