Buyers willing to trade a bigger mortgage for a home with little need for home improvement this spring left many other sellers facing price reductions.

The numbers don’t tell the whole story of this spring’s housing market, real estate agents across the state say.

While the median sale prices in many regions showed only slight appreciation or – in the case of Fairfield, Hartford and Tolland counties – a slight drop suggesting a relatively weak market, newly renovated, reasonably-priced properties saw the kind of intense buyer interest more familiar to Realtors in Boston or New York.

“You got a feeding frenzy for homes that are around $450,” said Rob Levine, 2019 president of the Greater Hartford Realtors Association and a broker with Hart Real Estate in West Hartford.

The key to selling these more expensive-than-normal homes, it seemed, was many buyers’ willingness to trade a bigger mortgage for a lack of home improvement projects, said Joanne Breen, the CT Realtors president-elect and an agent with ERA Sargis-Breen Real Estate Co. in Newington.

“Younger buyers would rather have a smaller house that’s completely turnkey than a larger home on a larger lot that might need some work,” she said.

Buyers willing to wait a month to get their home staged, or to fix lingering issues were rewarded with multiple offers, Breen said. For the majority of homeowners that weren’t, however, their properties tended to sit on the market, even if the price reflected the work that a home needed.

Part of this trend was fueled by investors fixing and flipping homes, particularly in communities like New Britain and Bristol, Levine and Breen said.

Small Movements in Prices

Outside of lower Fairfield County, this splintering of the market is hard to see through movements in the median sale price, Levine said, and can partly be blamed on the state’s spotty recovery from the Great Recession.

“You have to look at Connecticut through a different lens than the rest of the country. We never took off in the same way the rest of the country did,” he said.

No Connecticut county saw its median home sale price for the first six months of the year grow year-over-year more than Middlesex County, at 4.56 percent, according to data from The Warren Group, publisher of The Commercial Record.

And the state’s largest single-family housing markets – Greater Hartford, Fairfield County and New Haven County, in that order – all saw minimal movement in home prices. The total number of sales in Hartford County dropped 4.39 percent to 3,725, while its median sale price dropped 0.92 percent to $222,750. In Fairfield County, the number of sales drifted down 3.98 percent to 3,647 and the median sale price dropped 2.85 percent to $442,500. The number of New Haven County single-family sales slid 4.09 percent to 3,402 while the median price stayed constant at $225,000.

Are Buyers’ Tastes Changing?

Demand for move-in-ready homes isn’t a new trend, but its prominence in this spring’s market raises the question: Are tastes changing among those who can afford it?

Halstead Connecticut Executive Director of Sales Tammy Felenstein said buyers are now able to access reams of data about the real estate market.

“Our buyers are now very savvy. They know value when they see it,” she said.

A major factor, too, is student debt load carried by many Millennials, who now make up over 40 percent of all homebuyers.

Equally important, Breen said, is a combination of extremely low mortgage interest rates and the lack of capital available to many first-time buyers.

“Entry-level buyers and even in the middle price range, they don’t have a lot of cash and they don’t have a lot of time. Everybody’s working. They’d rather finance a bigger mortgage if they can get a home that’s move-in ready,” Breen said.

Another sign of this condition, Breen said, could be found in the performance of homes in communities like East Hartford, Manchester, where smaller homes could be found in droves and the median sale prices were all below $200,000, according to The Warren Group.

Of the 66 towns with more than 50 home sales in the first six months of the year where the median home sale price grew faster on a year-over-year basis than the state median, 62 had median sale prices of $380,000 or below and 48 had median sale prices of $300,000 or below.

High-end homebuyers in Fairfield County are increasingly abandoning large houses on large lots, real estate agents say, in favor of smaller properties closer to shops and amenities like Metro North stations.

High-End Home Sales Droop

While homes on the lower end of the market seemed to attract attention from buyers, the high-end market suffered across the state.

The biggest softness in the Hartford area, Levine said, was in homes priced at $600,000, $700,000 and more. Levine pointed to the state’s troubled economy as the reason and said as the state reaches its statutory cap on rainy-day savings, it should consider property tax cuts and other measures that could help lure residents and companies from nearby overheated markets like New York and Boston.

In lower Fairfield County, luxury real estate mascots Darien and New Canaan saw their median sale prices for the first six months of the year fall by 17.7 percent and 12.6 percent on a year-over-year basis to $1.185 million and 1.18 million, respectively, part of a larger decline in the area’s higher-end communities. In the former, the number of home sales dropped 4.7 percent to 121 while they grew by 14 percent in the latter, to 106.

Darien Board of Realtors President Julie Peters, a real estate sales associate with Houlihan Lawrence, said high-end Millennial buyers in both Darien and New Canaan were looking for dramatically different product than even a few years ago.

“I hear very often that they want to walk to the train, walk downtown,” she said. “They’re transitioning from urban living and they want those amenities.”

With far fewer takers for well-appointed, large houses on large lots, residents who had bought their homes for the privacy they offered were being forced into price cuts, she said.

“These are people who’ve been in their house for 20 years, and it’s very, very hard because they have a certain expectation about what the price should be,” she said. “The fortunate – and unfortunate – thing is that people in this community don’t have to sell but they want to sell, so they are more likely to take a timely price reduction.”

Both Stamford and Greenwich managed to surf the wave successfully, however. Greenwich saw its median sale prices for the first six months of the year grow by 2.5 percent to $1.65 million, and Stamford’s grew 4.17 percent to $599,000.

With its diversity of properties, four train stations and their associated commercial clusters and its proximity to New York City, Greenwich had enough stock to offer buyers – including many Baby Boomers – looking for something different, said Greenwich Association of Realtors Executive Vice President Stacy Loh.

In addition to its vibrant downtown and proximity to Manhattan, Halstead’s Felenstein said, Stamford also is benefiting from the more than 6,000 higher-end rental units built in recent years.

“That’s adding a lot of people. They’re paying very expensive rents and then they go on to buy but want to stay in this city,” she said.