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A new analysis by listings portal site Zillow says Greater Hartford offers some of the nation’s best bargains for those looking to buy a luxury home.
The company’s economists ranked the nation’s 42 biggest housing markets by the per-square-foot price of the median-sized $1 million home.
The median square footage of homes that sold at or near $1 million in Greater Hartford during the second quarter of 2022 was 4,873, while the median price per square foot was a mere $205 – the lowest of all the markets included in the analysis.
The typical million-dollar home in Hartford had four bedrooms, four bathrooms and was more than triple the size of the typical million-dollar home in San Jose, California, which would have sold for $715 per square foot in the second quarter.
The Zillow analysis did not include any other Connecticut metro areas, but an analysis of the Fairfield County housing market in the second quarter of 2022 prepared for luxury brokerage Douglas Elliman by real estate consultancy Miller Samuel found the average single-family price per square foot in the region was $441, at an average sales price of $1.15 million. The top 10 percent of the Fairfield County market boasted an average sales price of $3.62 million and an average-per-square-foot price of $707, the analysis found.
Zillow researchers also analyzed a subset of the nation’s housing markets and found that buyers of these million-dollar homes are getting less bang for their buck than they used to before the pandemic, calling it another instance of the “shrinkflation” that has hit many consumer products, as well.
Nation-wide, homes that sold at or near $1 million contracted nearly 500 square feet, from a peak of 3,021 in the middle of 2020 to a valley of 2,530 in early 2022, according to floor plan data for Zillow listings. Home size bounced back before July and is now 2,624 square feet, down 397 square feet from the 2020 peak.
“Buyers with seven-figure budgets shopping for homes during the pandemic were doing so coming off the longest period of economic growth in U.S. history and with the help of historically low interest rates,” Anushna Prakash, economic data analyst at Zillow, said in a statement. “Sales for expensive homes soared while buyers in the heat of competition accepted smaller layouts.”
The typical home in the $1 million range shrank in nearly every major metropolitan area, with Phoenix and Nashville seeing the largest declines: down 1,116 square feet from 2019 to 2022 in the case of the former and down 1,019 square feet in the latter.
