Rockingham Times

New Hampshire Realtors are looking ahead to the 2022 legislative session for more state tools to deal with the housing crisis, which has seen the median price of a house in Rockingham County rise to over $500,000 for the first time.

New Hampshire is among a nationwide trend in which housing inventory remains much lower than it was at this time last year, and sales prices are surging as a result.

“The median sales price was up 25.7% to $402,000 for single family homes and 20.5% to $300,000 for townhouse-condo properties,” the NH Monthly Indicators said. “Months supply of inventory decreased 60.9% for single family homes and 66.7% for townhouse-condo properties.”

People are looking to home builders to provide inventory and help meet buyer demand. Builders, however, are passing on to home buyers the rising construction costs.

“We all know that this (housing crisis) is not something that started in the pandemic,” Chris Norwood, New Hampshire Realtors' public policy committee chairman said in a President’s Update on YouTube. “We’ve been on a declining inventory for a number of years now -- rising rental rates for apartments, rising prices for the median price in the state of New Hampshire. We’re looking at seeing what we can do in the House and in the Senate for 2022 relative to the housing crunch that we find ourselves in.”

During the 2021 legislative session, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed into law House Bill 154, which will allow “municipalities to offer community revitalization tax incentives for the construction of additional housing in designated areas.” However, House Bill 586, an affordable housing bill that would promote “financial investments and incentives for affordable housing development,” didn’t pass.

“Housing Bill 586, that was just one tool to discuss what’s going on in the housing crisis,” Norwood said in the YouTube video. “This was a housing bill that would have tackled some of the challenges that our Realtor members see in the field, where we could look forward to having certain communities being labelled Housing Champions, that would perhaps afford them some additional benefits from the state.”