The reality of Southie Real Estate
To understand the dramatic price shift in South Boston’s housing market in the past seven years, one need only look a few blocks away to the neighborhood’s Seaport District, with its gleaming new towers and ever-present construction cranes.
Once a historically Irish-Catholic, blue-collar neighborhood that attracted entry-level buyers priced out of other parts of the city, South Boston is now out of reach for many of them, as prices have soared concurrently with the rise of luxury condo and office towers in the Seaport.
“It’s wealthy, not an entry-level market,” Delince Louis, a listing agent with Redfin, said of South Boston. “The demographic shift is incredible.”
Indeed, a 3,800-square-foot penthouse condo in a new luxury building on A Street, near the Broadway T stop, sold last month for $3,700,000 — a record price for a condo in the neighborhood outside the Seaport District, according to MLS data from Coldwell Banker, whose agent, Ricardo Rodriguez, brokered the deal for the seller. The four-bedroom unit has a direct elevator entrance, private roof deck, smart-home integration, and an interior designed by celebrity designer Taniya Nayak, Rodriguez said.
In the span of seven years, the median price of homes and condos in the South Boston ZIP code 02127, which excludes the Seaport District and Fort Point, increased from just under $400,000 to about $680,000, according to data from the Zillow real estate website. In the ZIP code that covers the Seaport and Fort Point (02210), the median rose from just under $600,000 to about $1 million in the same time period. Zillow does not separate single-family and condo sales data.