If you are looking to sell a home in the New Haven area, congratulations: You’re in the nation’s fourth-best-performing housing market right now.
A new study by Redfin identified the market, along with third-ranked Chicago, second-place Albany, New York and first-place Lake County, Illinois as the housing markets that have cooled the least this year as mortgage rates soaring above 6 percent put crimps in homebuyers’ and sellers’ plans nation-wide.
Redfin researchers analyzed a range of trends, including changes in price per square foot, inventory and change in the share of homes that sell within two weeks to come up with its rankings.
Nearly all – except No. 10 market, El Paso, Texas – of the 20 markets seeing the least cooling were in the Midwest or were secondary and tertiary markets along the East Coast.
Fairfield County, which Redfin identified as the Bridgeport metro, and Greater Hartford took the eighth and 18th slots on the list, respectively.
“Homes in places like Chicago and Milwaukee certainly got more expensive during the pandemic homebuying boom, but they’re still affordable compared with the rest of the country,” Redfin Senior Economist Sheharyar Bokhari said in a statement. “They’re slow to feel the impacts of economic headwinds like inflation and the Fed raising interest rates because the relatively affordable home prices make them attractive to house hunters seeking deals, and homes are already priced low enough that there’s not much room to fall. These markets don’t have much volatility.”