The stuck third

The gradient runs cleanly in one direction across all four groups. The most affordable quarter of Massachusetts towns has the highest share of owners who have not moved in fifteen years; the most expensive quarter has the lowest. The relationship is moderate rather than dramatic — a spread of roughly 6.3 percentage points — but it is consistent, and it survives excluding small towns.

The plain reading: households in expensive towns move because they can. Trading within a costly market requires equity and options, and those owners have both. In more affordable towns, moving often means losing the very affordability that keeps a household in place — so people stay. The homes that are hardest to buy are also the ones least likely to come up for sale.

Source. Massachusetts municipal assessment rolls as of mid-2026, combined with public transaction records. No MLS data is used anywhere in this study, which means the figures can be independently checked against the same public records by anyone.

Definitions. A parcel is counted as long-held when recorded ownership reaches fifteen years or more. “Assessed value” is the municipal assessment, which is set for taxation and lags open-market pricing — so every dollar figure here is conservative. Long-held value is each town’s count of 15-plus-year owners multiplied by that town’s median assessment.

Exclusions, stated openly. The underlying dataset covers 118 municipalities. Towns with fewer than 1,000 residential parcels were set aside as too small to compare reliably. Beyond that, exactly one exclusion rule was applied, and it is tied to the measure under study: a town is dropped if its 15-plus-year ownership share sits more than two and a half standard deviations from the rest of the set. That removes 3 towns — Belmont, Everett, North Reading — whose readings fall so far outside every other municipality that incomplete ownership-date history in those records is the likelier explanation than a real local condition. That leaves the 111 towns published here.

No town was excluded for having an inconvenient result, and none was excluded on absentee-ownership grounds — Boston, for instance, has by far the highest absentee share in the set and is retained, because a large rental and condominium stock makes that figure entirely plausible. Applying the exclusion rule or omitting it does not change the direction of any finding; it changes the headline percentage by less than a tenth of a point.

What this study does not claim. It measures how long homes have been held. It does not measure why, does not forecast, and does not model future supply. Assessed values are not sale prices.

Analysis by Kealan Green. Data as of mid-2026; published July 27, 2026. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures with attribution — the full 111-town table is available on request.