click to enlarge - File: Daria Bishop
- Homes at the Hillside at O'Brien Farm development in South Burlington
Still Squeezed: In the Burlington Area, Construction Can't Keep Up With Demand
A Zillow search for a three-bedroom home in the Burlington area these days yields listings with price tags of $700,000 to $800,000. There are homes offered for under $350,000, but they often include euphemisms such as "a great place to showcase your renovation skills!"
Several years after state government started spending millions to build apartments, housing of all types remains in very short supply in Chittenden County, according to Burlington-area real estate brokers.
New Homes 2023, By Price
Municipality |
Affordable |
Market |
Total |
BURLINGTON |
5 |
114 |
119 |
CHARLOTTE |
0 |
10 |
10 |
COLCHESTER |
38 |
22 |
60 |
ESSEX |
0 |
25 |
25 |
ESSEX JUNCTION |
1 |
102 |
103 |
HINESBURG |
0 |
19 |
19 |
HUNTINGTON |
0 |
6 |
6 |
MILTON |
2 |
28 |
30 |
SHELBURNE |
2 |
61 |
63 |
SO. BURLINGTON |
80 |
208 |
288 |
WESTFORD |
0 |
8 |
8 |
WILLISTON |
0 |
15 |
15 |
WINOOSKI |
0 |
-3 |
-3 |
Grand Total |
128 |
615 |
743 |
Source: Chitttenden County Regional Planning Commission
"Demand exceeds supply in every segment of the market, from affordable housing to large estate-style, very expensive homes," said David Parsons, who specializes in condo sales at RE/MAX North Professionals. What the market needs most, he said, is 900- to 1,200-square-foot three-bedroom homes that are suitable and affordable for most working people.
"That would open up many other gridlocked pieces of the market," he said.
click to enlarge - Source: Preliminary Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission 2023 Housing Database
Only 743 houses and apartments were built last year in Burlington and the 12 communities that surround it, according to the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission.
The pace of housing growth is not keeping up with demand, the commission noted, citing its estimate that the area needs 5,000 new homes in the next five years.
click to enlarge - Source: Vermont Housing Finance Agency
Mountain Mansions: $1 Million-Plus Homes and Condos Are Proliferating in Resort Areas
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Pall Spera Company Realtors
- 54 Westmount View in Stowe sold for $2.3 million in September 2023.
The median sale price for a newly built home in Lamoille County rose to $1 million last year — a 13 percent increase over the year before. New-home values in other resort areas are rising steeply, too, reflecting Vermont's continued appeal to vacation-home buyers from other states.
In Lamoille County, most of the new second-home construction is happening in Stowe, where several developments include million-dollar condos and houses. One four-bedroom Stowe condo sold last year for $2.9 million, about $1,000 per square foot, according to Brian Racine, a regional manager at Four Seasons Sotheby's International Realty.
While the market for multimillion-dollar properties is booming, the growth of affordable or market-rate housing is happening more slowly. Prices for new homes all over Vermont are rising, a consequence of increasing land, labor and construction materials costs. High demand is driving up costs, too.
"There is precious little money to go around to build affordable units," said Lucy Leriche, interim executive director of Lamoille Housing Partnership, an affordable-housing agency that owns about 350 homes, apartments and mobile home lots. The nonprofit has added about 50 homes in the past few years, she said — and has a waiting list of about 600 households. She said land prices typically make it too expensive for the housing partnership to build homes in Stowe.
Stowe Town Manager Charles Safford said buildable land is scarce in Stowe, where about 50 percent of all property is conserved from development. Affordability isn't a new issue in the town: Seventeen years ago, when Safford was appointed, he shopped for a home in Stowe but couldn't find one that fit his budget. He and his family ended up in living in Elmore.
Safford said Stowe has about 1,000 short-term rentals and about two-thirds of its homes are second homes. He noted that Stowe residents have asked lawmakers to address the rising education costs that lead to higher property taxes.
"I don't mean to alarm people, but the reappraisal is coming out this year, and it's going to likely double housing values in Stowe," Safford said. He added that many people who live in town full time can't afford to stay there.
"People look at Stowe and say, 'You're all set,' but what a lot of people don't understand is that the [full-time residents] are Vermonters trying to hang on to their homes and farms just like everybody else," he said.
Woodstock, located a half-hour drive from the Killington ski area, also has new condos selling for more than $1 million. At Killington, a company called Prestige Real Estate is advertising four-bedroom town houses, not yet built, for $3 million.
The county with the highest median price for a newly built home last year, $1.5 million, was Windham, home to the Stratton and Mount Snow ski areas, according to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.
Real estate agent Adam Palmiter, who works for Mount Snow Real Estate at Berkley and Veller in the southern Vermont town of Dover, said developers in several towns there are building homes without specific clients in mind and selling them for $3 million and $4 million — speculation that is unusual in Vermont. They know there are buyers for these expensive homes.
"Some developers are very in tune with the market," Palmiter said, adding that buyers tend to come from urban areas such as Boston and New York City.
The median price for newly built homes is much lower in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. In Caledonia County, home to Burke Mountain Resort, the median new-home price last year was just $337,000, VHFA said. It was $309,000 in Orleans County. VHFA didn't have data for Essex County.
VHFA draws its data from MLS, or multiple listing service, a database used by real estate brokers. That means the median price for new homes doesn't include the apartments and town homes built by affordable housing agencies, which don't list homes with real estate agencies. High-end homes might not appear on MLS, either. Increasingly, developers sell the homes themselves.
"Buyer demand is so high that builders can have their own in-house sales team and take care of the transaction themselves," said Racine, the Four Seasons Sotheby's manager.