This Mass. town is among the country’s most expensive, according to new report

LendingTree recently compared the median income and home value in U.S. towns with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 to find the most expensive towns in the nation.

The Vineyard Haven metro, which encompasses all of Martha’s Vineyard, ranked No. 1.

With a median home value of $857,000, Vineyard Haven sits atop a list including Breckenridge, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming. 

But it’s not just home values that has Vineyard Haven so high on the list. 

Vineyard Haven, Jackson and Hailey, Idaho, all have home values around 8.5 times higher than the median area household incomes. 

By comparison, the report found that the city of San Francisco, California, has a similar median home value, at $933,300, relative to the population.

These statistics are also interesting given that, according to the Vineyard Gazette, this area has the lowest rate of home sales in the last 10 years. 

“The market is trying to correct itself. During the pandemic, things got way out of whack. We had a lot of people trying to buy what was on the market, which wiped out the inventory and then, due to demand, the prices rose. The market is correcting itself and there are some price reductions on homes that were overpriced,” Karen Overtoom of Karen M. Overtoom Real Estate in West Tisbury said to the gazette. 

Other real estate experts, such as Marilyn Moses of Ocean Park Realty, told the Vineyard Gazette that the lack of buying comes down to high interest rates as well. 

“Sellers don’t want to lose their interest rate. I have sellers who say, ‘I’m in the 2 to 2.3 to 3.2 percent. Why would I buy another house where I’m hit with a 6 or 7 percent interest rate?’” she said. 

But just because there doesn’t seem to be that much on the market doesn’t mean the price of home ownership on this well-known vacation spot is cheaper, according to reporting by The Martha’s Vineyard Times. 

In fact, the average home sale went up around 9% last year, bringing the mean to $2.3 million.