Cross Route 3A from the Hingham Ferry Terminal and you'll find a stretch of land at 29 Shipyard Drive that has spent the better part of two years moving through the town's Planning Board. Toll Brothers wants to build 52 condominiums there. The architectural plans have been revised as recently as January 2026, peer review reports have gone back and forth since the summer of 2025, and as of this writing the project is still working through site plan approval rather than sitting finished. It sounds like a footnote. It's actually the clearest evidence available for why the "median home price" you saw for Hingham on a portal last week doesn't describe the house you're actually shopping for.
Here's the thing nobody selling you a single number wants to explain: Hingham isn't one housing market. It's two, stitched together into a headline figure that smooths over the seam.
One town, two supply curves
Drive from Hingham Square out toward Turkey Hill or South Hingham and you're looking at a single-family market with almost no way to add inventory. The lots were subdivided decades ago. The historic district and the town's zoning bylaws limit teardown-and-rebuild at scale. When a well-priced colonial or cape comes on the market under $2 million, it moves fast, and it moves at or above asking, because there is structurally nowhere else for that demand to go.
Now drive two miles to the Shipyard. That's a different supply story entirely. Brio, the 77-unit waterfront condominium building, already delivered its units with direct marina and harbor views. Older buildings like The Moorings, Hewitts Landing, and the townhomes at Beals Cove added more before that. And now Toll Brothers, partnered with Jumbo Capital, is proposing another 52 units at 29 Shipyard Drive, positioned directly across from the ferry terminal itself.
That's new supply landing in one specific quarter-mile radius while the rest of town adds essentially none. When you blend those two supply pictures into a single median price for "Hingham," you get a number that describes neither market particularly well.
What the current numbers actually show
The data backs up the split, once you look at it by property type instead of by town-wide average. In the second quarter of 2026, the median sale price for a single-family home in Hingham reached roughly $1.4 million, up 26 percent year over year, with the median price per square foot climbing to $568, up 12 percent over the same period, according to PropertyShark's residential market trends for Hingham. That's the land-locked core doing exactly what a market with no new supply does when demand holds steady: it gets more expensive per square foot, every quarter, without much relief.
Condos tell a quieter story. As of late August 2026, RealtyTrac's Hingham market snapshot shows single-family homes commanding roughly $33 more per square foot than condos on average in town. That gap exists because condo buyers in the Shipyard corridor are pricing in something the single-family core doesn't have to offer: a building that was constructed in the last several years, an assigned parking spot, a marina view, and a walk to the ferry instead of a fifteen-minute drive.
| Single-family core | Shipyard condo corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| New supply since 2020 | Effectively none, limited by zoning and lot availability | Brio's 77 units, plus 52 more proposed at 29 Shipyard Drive |
| Q2 2026 price trend | Median $1.4M, up 26% YoY | Lower $/sqft than single-family, per RealtyTrac |
| Transit access | Drive to ferry or commuter rail | Walk to Hingham Ferry Terminal |
| What's driving price | Scarcity of land, historic district limits | Newer construction, waterfront amenities |
The transit investment tells you where the town is placing its bet
If the Toll Brothers filing were the only signal, you could dismiss it as one developer's guess. It isn't alone. The MBTA has been putting real capital into this exact corridor, and the timing lines up.
In August 2025, the MBTA introduced the Millennium, a 400-passenger catamaran, specifically to relieve overcrowding on the Hingham route, according to reporting from Boston.com. That's the agency's largest ferry, assigned to the busiest Hingham trips because ridership had outgrown the boats already running. Separately, the MBTA has been rebuilding the Hingham Ferry Dock itself, replacing the floating dock and gangway to bring the terminal into full accessibility compliance, with completion expected this fall, per the MBTA's own project page. Add in the bus route changes the town describes on its own Economic Development page, which notes expanded ferry capacity and new MBTA bus service connecting the terminal to Hingham Square, and you have a transit agency actively investing in the one part of town where private developers are also trying to add housing.
None of that capital is flowing toward the single-family neighborhoods. It doesn't need to. Nobody is proposing to add fifty new houses on Turkey Hill Lane. The infrastructure money follows the corridor where density is actually increasing, which is the Shipyard, which is exactly where the condo supply is landing.
Who's actually buying in the core, and why it stays tight
The single-family scarcity isn't an accident of zoning alone. Hingham has a resident employment base that keeps buyers rooted in town rather than treating it as a stopover. The town's own economic development materials name the anchors directly: Blue Cross Blue Shield runs a 1,400-employee office in South Hingham, Russelectric Siemens builds power systems and controls equipment there, and family-owned manufacturers Venus Wafers and Yankee Trader Seafood have operated in town for years. The Knitwell Group, the fashion holding company behind Talbots, keeps its headquarters in Hingham as well, a detail with some local irony since Talbots itself was founded here.
That mix matters because it means a meaningful share of single-family demand isn't speculative or purely commuter-driven. It's people who work five minutes from where they live, who aren't especially price-sensitive to a Boston commute time, and who have every incentive to stay put once they buy. That kind of buyer doesn't churn inventory the way a purely commuter-driven market would. It just holds the core tight, year after year, regardless of what mortgage rates or national headlines are doing.
What this means if you're choosing between the two markets
If you're a move-up family set on the single-family core, price expectations should track the Q2 2026 figures directly: expect to compete for anything reasonably priced under $2 million, expect fast timelines, and understand that the scarcity driving those numbers isn't temporary. There's no pipeline of new single-family lots working through the Planning Board the way there is for Shipyard condos.
If you're a relocating professional weighing commute time against price, the Shipyard corridor deserves a second look you might not have given it. You're buying into a submarket that's actually getting new supply, sits steps from a ferry terminal the MBTA is actively upgrading, and has a straight commuter run into Rowes Wharf without the drive to a commuter rail lot. The 52 units Toll Brothers has proposed at 29 Shipyard Drive haven't cleared the town's approval process yet, so they're not something you can buy today, but their presence in the pipeline says something useful about where this segment of the market is headed over the next few years.
A few questions worth answering directly
Is the Toll Brothers project at 29 Shipyard Drive approved? As of this writing it is not. The town's planning documents show the project working through site plan review, with a revised architectural plan dated January 2026 and peer review reports filed through 2025. It's a real, active filing, not a finished building.
Does the ferry dock work affect service in the meantime? The MBTA has said ferry service continues to operate during construction, with the accessibility upgrade expected to be complete this fall. Riders should expect some parking and pedestrian rerouting near the terminal until the work wraps.
Why does single-family price per square foot keep outpacing condos in Hingham? Largely because the single-family core has almost no new construction to compete with existing stock, while the condo corridor is absorbing real new supply. Scarcity and supply are moving in opposite directions inside the same town, which is exactly why one town-wide median can't describe both.
If you're trying to figure out which side of this split actually fits your search, that's not a question a portal's headline number can answer. It takes someone who tracks the town's planning filings and the MBTA's capital projects as closely as the closed sales. That's the kind of look Tara Coveney gives every Hingham buyer and seller she works with. Reach out to request a private market consultation and get a read on where your specific search actually sits inside this town's two markets.
