More people from out of state are buying homes in New Hampshire during the pandemic, and prices for those homes are on the rise.
That’s according to buyer data collected by the Better Homes and Gardens The Masiello Group, which sells real estate in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. About 35 percent of the group’s clients in New Hampshire and Maine are coming from outside of northern New England.
Chris Masiello, the CEO, says it's a mixture of clients from large cities and suburbs looking for second homes and others who want to move here permanently.
Masiello predicts this will be more possible as companies allow employees to work from home permanently even after the pandemic is over.
“I think there's the whole dispersal of the workforce,” he says. “It won't even be the majority of the workforce, but it will be a subset of the workforce. I think that's one thing that will continue to drive people to move to a state like New Hampshire.”
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According to data from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, sale prices have jumped 12 percent over the past year. That’s double the increase realtors saw in the strong 2019 market.
Adam Dow, a realtor in Wolfeboro with Keller Williams Lakes and Mountains Realty, is seeing more older couples who may have opted to buy a second home a plane ride away or retire in a city, but are rethinking those plans a year into the pandemic.
And with housing stock in New Hampshire at an all-time low, he doesn’t expect the market to slow down anytime soon.
“When you have twenty people that make an offer on a house, nineteen of them don't get it,” he says. “So even if even if those numbers are cut in half, we still have way more people looking for the New Hampshire home than are finding them.”
