The spring home buying market in Greater Hartford got a healthy boost in April, with home sales and prices both showing gains compared with the same month a year ago, a new report shows.
The median sale price of a single-family house rose 7.1%, to $225,000 in April from $210,000 for the same month a year ago in the 57-town area tracked by the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors, an industry group. Sales rose 7.1% in the same period.
Through the first four months of this year, the median sale price — where half the sales are above, half below — increased nearly 10 percent to $219,000 compared with $200,000 for the same period in 2017. Sales fell 2%.
The association said the inventory of homes continued to dwindle in April, falling more than 13%. New listings increased less than 1%, barely adding to the supply of new homes on the market.
This is the fourth month in a row of year-over-year gains in the median sale price, a hopeful sign for a housing market that has struggled to regain its footings after the last recession.
But economists warn that a sustained recovery in housing will depend on the creation of jobs and reversing population declines.
On Thursday, the state Department of Labor reported Connecticut lost a net 1,400 jobs in April and had a higher loss in March — 3,500 jobs — than the preliminary loss estimate of 2,000 jobs.
In April, the Hartford labor market shed 1,900 jobs.
With the job losses reported Thursday, the state has regained 78% of the jobs it lost in the last recession and still has 26,200 to add until there is fully recovery. In Connecticut, the last recession stretched from March 2008 to February 2010.
"Importantly, extrapolating this growth out in time, we see that the state's economy is not likely to see full job recovery until sometime in mid-2020, and odds are we're likely to see a full-blown U.S. recession before that time if history is any indication," Donald L. Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners Inc. in Durham wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
Swings in the median price do not necessarily mean all prices or home values are moving in the same direction. Home prices can vary widely from town to town or even neighborhood to neighborhood, and they are influenced by location, property condition and updates to kitchens and bathrooms.
The median price also can be influenced by the mix of houses sold. Even so, the median is considered a good barometer of broad market trends.
