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Both single-family home and condo sales saw remarkable growth in the month of December, but 2009's total sales were still down from overall sales in 2008, ""The Warren Group"":http://www.thewarrengroup.com/portal/, a Boston-based provider of real estate data in New England, recently reported.
[IMAGE]There were 2,216 single-family home sales in Connecticut last December, a 34.8 percent jump from the 1,644 sales in December 2008. This notable increase helped the single-family housing market level off from 2008, but an overall decrease in sales was still recorded for the year. A total of 24,401 single-family homes were sold in 2009, down only 1.8 percent from 24,863 in 2008.
December was also a bright spot for condo sales, representing the third consecutive month that condo sales have increased. Compared to 537 condo sales in December 2008, sales in December 2009 soared 29.1 percent to 693. Despite this double-digit increase in sales for the month, total sales in 2009 continued to slump. From 8,536
[COLUMN_BREAK]condos sold in 2008, the number of transactions in 2009 plummeted 13.8 percent to 7,359, marking the second consecutive year that condo sales have fallen below 10,000.
""Single-family home sales in Connecticut posted solid gains during the last three months of 2009 and that helped to temper the sharp drops in monthly sales earlier in the year,"" said Timothy M. Warren Jr., CEO of The Warren Group. ""The homebuyer tax credit and low mortgage interest rates helped to boost the home sales. Median prices for single-family homes and condominiums continued to deteriorate last year, but on the positive side we did see a gain in the median price for single-family homes and condos in December â€" the first increase in more than a year.""
Connecticut's median price for a single-family home in December rose 3.6 percent to $238,250, up from $230,000 in December 2008. This was the first increase in monthly median home prices year-over-year since November 2007. However, the median home price for all of 2009 fell 10.2 percent to $240,500, down from $267,500 in 2008.
""Median home prices have been declining for two years and are now 18 percent lower than they were in 2007, when prices peaked in Connecticut,"" Warren said.
Results were similar for the median price of condos in Connecticut. At $178,000 in December 2009, the median condo price was 1.7 percent higher than the median price of $175,000 in December 2008. For the overall year, though, prices fell 8.8 percent. From 195,250 in 2008, the median condo price slipped to $178,000 in 2009.
