Massachusetts Condo Prices Depend on Which Number You Read

Four organizations measured the Massachusetts condo market in August 2026. One reported condo prices up 17.4 percent. One reported them up 3.7 percent. One reported them up 0.7 percent. When I pulled our own MLS PIN feed and looked at what actually closed, I found condo sellers giving up three times as much of their asking price as single family sellers did.

All four readings are correct. They measure different things, and the distance between them is where the useful information sits.

The story circulating right now is that condos are quietly outperforming single family homes while rates climb. I went looking for that in the closing data, and what I found was close to the opposite. The condo outperformance is mostly an artifact of how the number is built. On the measures that describe what a seller actually walks away with, condos are the softer half of this market, not the stronger one. That is worth knowing if you own one and expect last year’s price. It is worth more if you are a buyer trying to make something work at 7 percent.

Rates crossed 7 percent for the first time in twenty months

On September 24, Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey put the 30 year fixed at 7.03 percent. That is the first 7 handle since the week of January 16, 2025, roughly twenty months ago. It got there quickly. The four weekly prints in September ran 6.71, then 6.76, then 6.95, then 7.03.

A year ago that survey read 6.30 percent. The jump matters less as arithmetic than as a threshold. Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS, put it plainly when the number printed: crossing this mark “could create a chilling effect on the market, leading to home sales transactions to slow considerably this fall.” Bob Broeksmit at the Mortgage Bankers Association noted that both purchase and refinance applications were already running below a year ago.

I would add one thing from the ground. Seven percent is not a materially different payment from 6.9 percent. It is a materially different headline, and headlines move buyers who were already on the fence. That is the part sellers should plan around.

The 17.4 percent condo number is an average, and averages carry a tail

The eye catching figure comes from Lamacchia Realty’s August 2026 Massachusetts Housing Report. Statewide, the average condo sale price went from $660,824 in August 2025 to $776,190 in August 2026, up 17.4 percent. Single family over the same stretch went from $826,602 to $843,059, up 2.0 percent. Set side by side, that looks like a segment rotation.

It is an average, though, and a statewide average of condo sale prices is an unusually fragile thing. Here is why, from our own feed.

Across every MLS PIN condo sale that closed in Massachusetts between August 1 and September 24 of this year, 2,487 transactions in all, the average close price was $718,922. The median was $555,000. The average sits 29.5 percent above the median, which tells you the top of the distribution is doing a lot of work.

How much work is the part that surprised me. Condo sales above $1.5 million were 6.7 percent of the transactions and 22.9 percent of the dollars. Sales above $3 million alone carried 7.7 percent of all condo dollars in the state.

That is the mechanism. A statewide condo average is hostage to a few dozen closings in the Seaport, Back Bay and the new towers along the waterfront. Shift the timing of eight or ten of those into a given month and the statewide average moves several percent without a single ordinary condo in Malden or Watertown changing value. A 17.4 percent move in that number is not evidence that condos appreciated 17.4 percent. It is mostly evidence that the mix changed.

On medians, single family outperformed condos

Swap the average for the median and the ranking flips. The Greater Boston Association of Realtors Local Market Update for August 2026, built off the same MLS PIN data by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, reports it this way.

Single family median sale price went from $940,000 to $1,002,500, up 6.6 percent. Condo median went from $699,450 to $725,000, up 3.7 percent. Same month, same market, same underlying database. Measured at the middle of the distribution instead of the mean, single family beat condos by nearly two to one.

Then there is Zillow’s home value index, which is smoothed and seasonally adjusted and covers only the city of Boston. It has the citywide typical value at $774,723 in August, down 1.4 percent on the year, with the single family index down 4.4 percent to $828,266 and the condo index up 0.7 percent to $728,171. That one does show condos ahead of single family, in Boston proper, by 5.1 points.

Three datasets, three different answers about the same August. This is the part I want buyers and sellers to hold onto: a statewide average of closed sales, a regional median of closed sales, and a smoothed city level valuation index are not interchangeable, and quoting one as if it were another is how people end up mispricing a house. They should never be put in the same sentence as though they were the same number.

What our own closings show about who is actually conceding

Price indices argue. Closing statements do not. So I ran the measure that a seller feels directly, which is how much of the original asking price the property actually got, across the same window for both segments.

Massachusetts MLS PIN closed sales, August 1 through September 24, 2026. Condos, 2,487 transactions. Single family, 6,278 transactions.

Every one of those points the same way. Condos average 97.6 percent of their original list price. Single family homes average 99.2 percent. Put as a discount, that is 2.4 percent against 0.8 percent, so the average condo seller in Massachusetts is conceding three times what the average single family seller concedes.

The Realtors’ regional data lands in nearly the same place using its own method. GBAR has single family receiving 99.7 percent of original list price in August and condos receiving 97.7 percent. Two independent cuts of the market, one statewide and one regional, agreeing to within a couple of tenths.

One honest note on method. I deliberately did not run this year over year out of our own archive. That table prunes older closings over time, so August 2025 holds fewer records today than August 2026 does, and a naive comparison would have shown single family closings up more than 40 percent when the real statewide figure was about 2 percent. Everything above is a same window cross section, which the pruning does not distort.

The pattern holds town by town

Statewide numbers can hide a lot, so I cut the same window by city for the places that come up most in this conversation.

Source: MLS PIN closed sales, BMN Boston analysis, Aug. 1 to Sept. 24, 2026. Single family counts in Somerville and Boston are small, so treat those rows as directional rather than precise.

In all four towns the condo column concedes more of the asking price and sits longer than the single family column in the same town. Newton is the sharpest version. Of the 25 Newton condos that closed in that window, 84 percent sold below their original asking price, and they averaged 95.6 percent of it. Newton single family homes, with a larger sample of 70 sales, held 97.6 percent. The town where buyers are supposedly being priced out of houses and into condos is the town where condos are discounting hardest.

Quincy is the most useful to a working buyer, because the two sample sizes are close and the gap is still clean. Quincy single family homes got 99.3 percent of original list with 45.5 percent selling below it. Quincy condos got 97.0 percent with 70.5 percent selling below it, and sat about six days longer.

Why condos are the segment giving ground

Supply is most of it. The Realtors’ August data has single family inventory in Greater Boston at 2.0 months of supply and condos at 3.2 months. A condo buyer has roughly 60 percent more months of choice than a single family buyer does, and choice is what produces negotiating room. Condo inventory was flat on the year at 2,405 listings while new condo listings rose 16.4 percent, so more product keeps arriving into a segment that was not short to begin with.

The second piece is financing, and it is specific to condos in a way a lot of buyers do not see coming. Fannie Mae issued updated condo project standards in Lender Letter LL-2026-03 on March 18, 2026. The headline change raises the minimum reserve allocation an association must budget from 10 percent of annual assessment income to 15 percent, effective January 4, 2027. The letter also caps the per unit master policy deductible at $50,000 and makes a project ineligible when more than 15 percent of units are 60 days or more delinquent on assessments.

None of that changes what a condo is worth to live in. All of it changes how many buyers can get a loan on one specific building, and a unit in a building that a lender will not touch trades at a discount to an identical unit across the street in a building that clears. That is a real part of the 2.4 percent.

Master insurance is the third piece. Premiums on association policies have climbed hard across Massachusetts, and that cost lands in the monthly fee. The fee then lands in the buyer’s debt to income ratio, which shrinks the loan they qualify for, at the same moment the rate is doing the same thing. A $650 monthly fee is not a lifestyle detail. At current rates it is the difference of roughly $90,000 to $100,000 in purchasing power.

If you are selling, the original list price is the number that follows you

Statewide, price adjustments in August ran 677 listings against 458 a year earlier, up 47.8 percent. That is the clearest signal in the Lamacchia report, and it applies to both segments.

The thing sellers consistently underestimate is that the market scores you against your original asking price, not the reduced one. Every statistic in this article, ours and the Realtors’ alike, is computed off original list. When you start 8 percent high and cut twice, you do not arrive at the same outcome as the seller who priced correctly in week one. You arrive at a lower number, later, with a days on market figure that tells every buyer’s agent to come in under asking.

So my advice is the same for both sides of this market, with different urgency. If you are selling a single family home, you are in the stronger segment and you still cannot price off last spring. Your segment holds 99.2 percent of original list because those sellers priced to today. If you are selling a condo, price to today’s comps and read the ones that closed, not the ones still sitting. And get in front of the financing questions before you list. Have the reserve study, the master policy declarations and the last year of meeting minutes ready, because a buyer’s lender is going to ask, and a two week delay at 7 percent loses you buyers.

If you are buying, condos are where the room is

The practical conclusion for buyers is the one that was circulating, arrived at from the opposite direction. Condos are the segment worth shopping right now. Not because they are appreciating faster, which the closing data does not support, but because they are the segment where sellers are conceding, inventory is deeper, and a reasonable offer under asking is landing more often than not. Sixty percent of Massachusetts condo sales closed below the original asking price this summer. You are not being unreasonable. You are being typical.

What I would do with that, concretely:

Ask for the reserve study, the master insurance declarations page, the current budget and twelve months of meeting minutes before you write, not after. Ask your lender to run the project through Condo Project Manager early. A building that fails on reserves or delinquency is not necessarily a bad building, but it is a smaller buyer pool, which is leverage for you and a risk to your own resale. Put the full monthly fee into your affordability math from the start rather than treating it as a rounding error. And look at the units sitting past 90 days, because in the condo segment that is 34.5 percent of everything that eventually sold.

If you have been watching Newton single family homes and concluding the math no longer works at 7 percent, the condo inventory in Quincy, Somerville and parts of Boston is worth a real look before this gets obvious. More of our Massachusetts condo coverage goes deeper on fees, associations and what to check in a building.

Which number to trust, and for what

Since four sources gave four answers, here is how I use each one.

A statewide average sale price is the least useful for pricing a specific home. It moves on mix, and in the condo segment the tail is heavy enough that the average tells you more about the luxury market’s timing than about your building.

A median sale price is better, and the regional Realtor medians are the ones I would quote in conversation. They still move on mix, but far less.

A home value index like Zillow’s is smoothed and seasonally adjusted, which makes it good for direction over a year and poor for pricing a listing next Tuesday. It also excludes two to four unit buildings, which matters a great deal in a market full of triple deckers.

The percent of original list price received, along with days on market and months of supply, is what I actually price from. It is the only one of these that describes the negotiation rather than the inventory, and it is the one that has been telling a consistent story all summer while the headline averages argued with each other.

The condo market is not quietly outperforming. It is quietly conceding, which is a different thing and, for anyone trying to buy at 7.03 percent, a more useful one.

If you are trying to work out what your own place would actually get in this market, or whether a specific building clears financing, that is a conversation worth having before you list or write an offer. You can start with a valuation here or reach out directly and I will pull the comps that match your unit rather than the statewide average.

Sources

• Freddie Mac, Primary Mortgage Market Survey, weekly releases September 3 through September 24, 2026.
• Lamacchia Realty, August 2026 Massachusetts Housing Report.
• Greater Boston Association of Realtors, Local Market Update, August 2026, research tool provided by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
• Zillow Home Value Index, Boston, MA, August 2026.
• Fannie Mae Selling Guide, Project Standards, and Lender Letter LL-2026-03, March 18, 2026.
• Scotsman Guide, “It’s Freddie Mac official: Mortgage rates have blown past 7%”, September 24, 2026.
• Boston.com, “Condo fees are apt to go up, and experts say it’s about time”, April 17, 2026.
• MLS PIN closed sales, August 1 through September 24, 2026. BMN Boston analysis of 2,487 condo and 6,278 single family transactions.