Greater Hartford’s residential real estate market is showing initial signs it could be coming back to life, with new listings up significantly on a week-over-week basis on the high and low ends of the market.

New data from the Zillow Group shows new listings in the area were up in the seven days ending May 3 for the second week in a row.

For the four weeks ending April 26, the number of active listings was down nearly 29 percent year-over-year and the number of new listings was down over 47 percent. The number of pending sales was down almost 28 percent. Statewide, those figures are drops of 29 percent, 45 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

As a measure of how dramatically the market stalled when the coronavirus hit Connecticut, the number of new listings is down almost by 45 percent or more year-over-year for that period in all price categories.

Zillow’s statistics show the uptick in new listings is concentrated at the high and low ends of the market. While the number of listings in the most expensive fifth of the market are down 66 percent year-over-year in the week ending May 3, they are up 16.7 percent week-over-week. A similar pattern is seen in the second-lowest-priced fifth of the market, with the number of listings there down 45 percent year-over-year and 88 percent month-over-month, but up 20 percent week-over-week.

Growth in New Greater Hartford Listings

April 27-May 3, 2020
Source: Zillow Group

The local trend is mirrored by a national uptick in these segments, as well. New listings in the top fifth of the market were the first to drop off and fell below last year’s totals before homes in other price tiers. Expensive homes also had the steepest fall of any price tier, dropping 51.4 percent below last year by mid-April. Meanwhile, listings of the most-affordable homes – where there typically is the tightest inventory – have fallen 32.1 percent year over year at their lowest point. Nationally, the number of new listings has risen for three straight weeks.

Zillow economists say the split in the market’s different segments may be related to the reasons sellers typically list: younger owners who tend to own cheaper homes face more pressure from the arrival of a new job offer or child, while sellers of higher-end homes tend to have the resources to be flexible.

“Many sellers with the flexibility to delay or temporarily remove listings have opted to do so, perhaps waiting out the uncertainty. Now that more buyers are in the market, those sellers are wading back in, joining those who had remained motivated to sell for any number of life reasons and adapted with virtual tools and social distancing,” Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow, said in a statement. “We have not yet seen prices affected, though we expect them to fall modestly on a national level as the pandemic plays out.”