Drive past the Seaport today and count the cranes. You won't need many fingers.

As of late June, Boston had exactly one large condominium tower under construction: The Fallon Companies' 122-unit One Harbor Shore Drive, per Bisnow's reporting. Compare that to Miami and New York, where towers keep rising, and to Boston's own recent past, when it felt like a new luxury project was announced every week. Developers here are dealing with three things at once: higher interest rates, higher construction costs, and slow sales of the inventory they already built. So the pencils went down.

Here's the part that reads backwards at first. Right now, this looks like a buyer's market at the top end. Buyers are slowly picking off the last units from the development wave of the past decade, and those final projects are delivering into a very different market than the one they were conceived in. If you're shopping for a newer luxury condo in the Seaport or Back Bay, you have leverage and time that didn't exist three years ago.

But look one turn ahead. When almost nothing new breaks ground in 2026, that shows up as a supply cliff in 2027 and 2028. The units being absorbed today aren't being replaced. For an owner of a newer condo, that means near-term competition from unsold new construction, followed by a stretch where your building is one of the few modern options on the market. Timing your sale against that curve is the whole game.

This is exactly the kind of moment where the average price chart lies to you. "Condos are soft" is true this quarter and misleading about next year. The sellers who do well here are the ones who understand which side of the supply cliff they're selling into.

If you own a condo in one of Boston's newer buildings and you're weighing sell-now versus hold, the pipeline math should drive that decision, not the headline.

Own a Boston condo and unsure how to time the market? Let's map it out together.