May always feels like the real start of things up here. Inventory in Southern New Hampshire is finally loosening a bit, rates have pulled back from their January highs, and buyers who went quiet last fall are starting to circle back. There is a particular kind of energy in the market right now that I actually like. Not a frenzy. Not a freeze. Just people making real decisions.
Quirky Facts You Want to Know: The Sears House in Your Neighborhood
Between 1908 and 1940, Sears sold more than 70,000 homes out of its catalog. Not architectural plans. Not inspiration boards. Actual homes, shipped by train in crates of 30,000 pre-cut pieces, complete with a manual and enough hardware to put the whole thing together.
The catalog was called the Book of Modern Homes. You picked a style from more than 370 designs, placed your order, and a few weeks later a railcar arrived at your local freight station loaded with pre-cut lumber, windows, doors, plumbing, hardware, and paint. Prices started at $360 in 1908 for a basic bungalow. The more elaborate models ran closer to $3,500 by the 1920s.
What made it genuinely unusual was that Sears also offered financing. They became one of the country’s early mass-market home lenders, extending mortgages on tens of thousands of their own kit homes before the Depression eroded that side of the business.
The program ended with the 1940 catalog, with the last sales completed through local offices in 1942.
The homes are still out there. Thousands of them. A lot of homeowners have no idea they are living in one. A few hallmarks: the houses tend to have slightly unusual ceiling heights (often 8.5 feet instead of the standard 8), distinctive basement beam pockets that match original blueprints, and stair risers that are a hair lower than current code requires. Some New England neighborhoods still have clusters of them on a single street, because when the catalog arrived, the whole block sometimes ordered at once.
Architectural historians have compiled searchable databases of confirmed Sears homes, and the Old House Journal has documented hundreds of verified examples. If you come across a house with an oddly pleasant ceiling height and an old railroad receipt tucked in the basement, it might be worth a look at the Sears Catalog archive before you assume it was custom built.
For the full deep-dive, see the Sears Kit Houses guide on TDS.
Town of the Week: Marblehead, MA
Marblehead is the kind of town that people who grew up nearby take for granted until someone from somewhere else sees it for the first time and cannot believe it is real. It sits 17 miles north of Boston on a rocky peninsula jutting into Massachusetts Bay, has been occupied since 1629, and has a harbor so full of sailboats in summer that it has been called the sailing capital of America. That is not marketing. Marblehead Race Week is the oldest sailing regatta in the country.
The town is small, dense, and almost entirely walkable once you get into Old Town, which is the historic district of narrow colonial streets that feels genuinely like it has not been designed to look historic. It just is. Washington Street is the main commercial artery. The Muffin Shop has been there since 1988 and is worth the stop for breakfast or coffee regardless of how long the line looks. For harbor views, Fort Sewall is a Revolutionary War fortification that sits at the edge of the water and costs nothing to visit. On the other side of the Neck, Chandler Hovey Park has the lighthouse and a view that people drive an hour for.
Weekends for Marblehead residents tend to revolve around the harbor, the farmers market on Saturdays in season, and the kind of low-key waterfront routine that becomes harder to imagine living without once you have it. The commute into Boston is about 30 to 40 minutes by car, and the commuter rail from nearby Salem runs to North Station if you would rather not drive.
Housing in Marblehead is competitive and has been getting more so. The median sale price hit $830,000 in March 2026, up 6.5% from a year earlier, according to Redfin. Homes are selling in an average of 29 days. The Old Town neighborhood and anything with water views commands a strong premium. The Neck is its own category: smaller lots, more turnover, and prices that can climb well above the median.
For more on what it is actually like to live there, see the Marblehead, MA town guide on TDS.
New England Market Pulse
Rates are down year-over-year, even with the recent uptick. The 30-year fixed rate averaged 6.37% as of May 7, 2026, according to the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That is up slightly from 6.30% the prior week, but down from 6.76% a year ago. On a $500,000 loan, the year-over-year improvement works out to roughly $130 less per month. If your pre-approval quote is from the winter, the number has probably shifted. Worth a call to your lender before you assume you know what you can afford.
Southern NH is giving buyers more room to breathe. New Hampshire homes averaged 44 days on market through the first part of 2026, compared to 32 days in 2024. Inventory rose 13.2% year-over-year in March, and 14.3% of listings saw price reductions, up from 13% a year earlier. The median single-family price is holding around $500,000 to $530,000. If you stepped back from Southern NH last year because the competition felt punishing, the dynamics have shifted enough to warrant a fresh look. Source: Concord Monitor, April 8, 2026.
Massachusetts property assessments went up almost everywhere. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue certified FY2026 assessed values for 343 communities. In 340 of them, values increased. The statewide median increase was 6%, and total assessed value crossed $2 trillion for the first time. For North Shore homeowners, your assessed value is likely higher than it was last year. Proposition 2.5 limits how much the actual tax levy can increase (roughly 2.5%), so your bill will not go up by the same percentage as your assessment. Still, if your assessed value looks high relative to recent comparable sales in your neighborhood, you can file an abatement application with your local assessor. The process is simpler than most people expect. Source: Mass.gov, FY2026 Tax Levies and Assessed Values.
Real estate conversations happen at dinner tables, not just open houses. If someone you know is in that conversation right now, I would be grateful for the introduction.
Tara Donahue-Scott tarad@kw.com | tarashomes.com