In a hot housing market, Boston buyers are being more strategic

Mortgage payments in Greater Boston still rank among the highest in the nation. But a shift has taken place. No longer are prospective buyers getting caught up in the frenzy of bidding wars and stretching their purchase price and mortgage payment to the maximum they can afford. Instead, real estate professionals say that buyers are taking a more cautious approach today, thinking twice about what they’re willing to pay.

According to data recently released by LendingTree, the average mortgage payment on home purchases fell 2.4 percent in 2025, from $1,990 in 2024 to $1,942 per month (for principal and interest only). Still, home affordability remains a challenge: LendingTree reported that one in 10 borrowers are significantly cost-burdened, with 10.2 percent of borrowers nationwide spending 40 percent or more of their income on new mortgage payments.

According to the data, Greater Boston ranked seventh for metros with the highest average new mortgage payments in 2025. The average mortgage payment in the area was $2,784 a month, and 31.4 percent of borrowers spent at least 30 percent of their income on their mortgage payment.

Of course, if you add the other costs that get rolled into mortgage payments — property taxes, home insurance, and private mortgage insurance — that monthly housing cost goes up even higher, and that doesn’t even include utilities and homeowners association fees. While LendingTree couldn’t provide a total monthly housing cost for the Boston metro, WalletHub recently released data on the states where people spend the most and least for housing, and Massachusetts ranked third on that list, with average homeowners there paying about 34 percent of their income on housing costs, second only to Hawaii and California.

“Boston’s core issue is simple: too many people are chasing too few homes,” said Matt Schulz, LendingTree’s chief consumer finance analyst. “The area has struggled with housing supply for years, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon.”

The good news is that despite the price pressure and challenge of bidding wars, local experts say that buyers today are not stretching their budgets just to get into a home and then find that they became cash-poor in the process.

“People today are a little more strategic,” said Melvin A. Vieira Jr., a real estate agent with Re/Max Real Estate Center in Boston. “Buyers are more educated, and they’ve heard about the bidding wars of the past, so they’re making reasonable decisions rather than emotional ones.”

Consider Sarah, 36, and Mike McCracken, 38. When they were searching for their first home, they were approved for a $900,000 mortgage and could have easily afforded the four-bedroom, three-bath Colonial in Sudbury that they fell in love with. But Sarah was nervous about owing more than $650,000. So, they expanded their search and found a smaller Cape Cod-style home in Walpole, which they purchased for $575,000.

“We could have made the numbers work with the original house,” said Sarah, who has since become a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker. “But being more conservative and making a decision that made sense for the present, rather than a hypothetical future, allowed us to have a smaller mortgage payment and keep other costs lower so we could travel when we want to and were able to do a renovation when we needed to. Giving ourselves the flexibility to make decisions as they came up because we hadn’t locked in that higher payment was the best decision.”

Robyn A. Friedman is an award-winning freelance writer who has covered real estate and personal finance for over two decades. Follow her @robynafriedman.