A poor fourth quarter, capped by a lackluster December, helped drag 2010 Connecticut single-family home sales to their lowest annual level since 1991, according to Boston data tracker The Warren Group.
This marks the sixth straight year in which sales volume declined from the prior year.
Single-family home sales fell to 24,270 in 2010, down just 0.54 percent from 24,401 in 2009.
But December’s 1,858 single-family sales represented a 16 percent year-over-year drop from 2,216 in December 2009. At the same time the overall fourth quarter numbers were down more than 26 percent year-over-year – to 5,306 single-family sales compared to 7,190 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
It was the slowest fourth quarter for single-family sales since 1990’s 5,124 single-family sales, according to The Warren Group.
The number of single-family sales was also down from the third quarter of 2010, when the state recorded 6,340 sales.
December’s sales were up from November, when 1,688 sales were recorded. Nevertheless, December represented the fourth straight month that single-family sales fell below 2,000 in Connecticut.
“I think we can expect at least another six months or so of year-over-year declines in home sales in Connecticut,” said CEO Timothy M. Warren Jr. “Home sales in the first half of last year were buoyed by the second round of the homebuyer tax credit, and it would be incredibly difficult to exceed those numbers.”
The median price for single-family homes sold in Connecticut for 2010 was $250,000, a nearly 4 percent increase from 2009. The median price for single-family homes sold in December rose nearly 2 percent to $243,000, up from $238,250 during the same month in 2009.
