Photo courtesy of Cindy Raney & Team
Jason Mudd
Managing Partner, Cindy Raney & Team
Industry experience: 15 years
Age: 56
Heading into the fall, interest rates appear set to decline while the median year-to-date sale price in Fairfield County has increased by 6.8 percent according to The Warren Group, the publisher of The Commercial Record.
While inventory remains an issue, competition for homes is on the decline according to Jason Mudd, the managing partner of Cindy Raney & Team, which is a part of Coldwell Banker Global Luxury. The Nutmeg State received a surge of residents during the pandemic as households spending money on higher-end New York City real estate moved to the more bucolic luxury market in Connecticut. Now the number of out-of-state buyers is beginning to dwindle.
In Fairfield County, Mudd deals with wealthy clients who are purchasing homes in the upper end of the market, including recently selling a home for $6 million. Before entering real estate, Mudd held senior leadership roles at companies like PepsiCo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and BNY Mellon.
Q: How does the 2025 housing market compare to last year?
A: It’s been similar in a lot of regards. The overarching theme has been limited inventory, still relatively high demand coming from outside Connecticut, but also from people naturally moving within the state. And because there’s been such limited supply, homes that are priced properly are continuing to get multiple offers, often over asking. In most of the high-net worth markets we cover across Fairfield County, homes are still doing well, but they have to be priced properly, and they have to be staged or look as though somebody could move in and not have to do a dramatic amount of work. You can’t just put a house on the market, slap it on there at any price and have it move.
So far, we are seeing a little bit of a slowdown in terms of activity from the buyer side in the last month, meaning we’ve seen fewer people coming through the open houses we’ve been participating in and fewer offers being made, which could potentially create a lower-priced offer, because it’s just not as competitive. But we’re still seeing good offers being made/ We’re keeping an eye on it because the rest of the country certainly has turned into more of a buyer’s market. We’re still very much in a seller’s market [in Fairfield County], but it’s starting to shift a little bit.
Q: What do you think is driving this reduction in competition?
A: Probably the biggest factor is there’s a bit of uncertainty in terms of what’s going to happen with the economy. Prior to [the Federal Reserve’s strong indications of an interest rate cut this fall], there’s just been a lot of uncertainty as to what’s going on in the world, and I think there’s still some question as to where we are in the economy. I think there’s a lot of people that I talk to that are very concerned about some of the policies that have been put in place, and what that means, short-term, for the economy. If the Fed does drop interest rates, it’s not an automatic mortgage rate drop. They’re correlated, but not directly or absolutely.
I think it’s also the season. This is the kind of the time of season where if you haven’t made a move by now, and you’ve got kids, you’ve got to get your kids into a school system. Historically speaking, we tend to slow down a little bit in August. COVID did away with some seasonality, but not all. I think now that we’re four years removed from COVID, or three-plus, we’re starting to shift back to a little bit more normalcy.
Q: How much of an impact have interest rates had on the luxury market?
A: Our market is very different than 99 percent of the country. For us, luxury is north of $3 million, right? I don’t think that at the higher end of the market – and I’m saying north of $3 million – interest rates play any impact at all. A rate cut will probably bring in some buyers who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting. But again, we’ll have to see what happens. Just because the Fed says they’ll be dropping rates this fall doesn’t mean they will, and if they do that doesn’t necessarily move the mortgage market immediately, but I think it will.
Q: What’s your typical buyer for that Fairfield County luxury home in today’s market?
A: I don’t really think that the buyer demographic, in terms of where they’re coming from, has shifted a whole lot. It is a wealthy market. You’ve got people who are coming from other parts of the country. That’s kind of norm. I would say that we’re seeing fewer out-of-state purchases, but there’s still the occasional person who comes to the area. We just sold a $6 million house to somebody from Maryland and he’s working for a private equity firm out of New York. The financial services industry in New York is what drives a lot of the traffic to our area because there are a lot of people who want to work in finance. They don’t have to commute five days a week, so we’re still seeing that person.
There’s still just a normal course of action, people downsizing, people upsizing, unfortunately getting a divorce. There’s still a lot of just what causes people to move to begin with. I don’t think we’re seeing quite as much of the frenetic activity of people happen to be out of a city or the thing like that, but you still have people saying, “Look, we want to live in Connecticut, because I don’t have to commute five days a week,” and a lot of their friends have moved out here, and it’s a really desirable place to be. What does $3 million get in New York City? It doesn’t get much of anything.
Mudd’s Five Favorite Recent Reads
- “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” by David Ogilvy
- “Poor Charlie’s Almanac,” Charlie Munger
- “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” by Clayton Christensen
- “Invent & Wander,” by Jeff Bezos
- “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” by Robert Cialdini
