What a timely article in today's Washington Post that directly contradicts the old argument two posts below that "Northern VA is different . . . jobs, everyone wants to live here, thousands moving here every day, etc. ad nauseum."
The galloping growth of Washington's outer Virginia suburbs is slowing at last, according to Census Bureau estimates to be released today, with high housing costs beginning to dull the appeal of counties that have long been a magnet for newcomers.
. . .
Mike Gorman, owner of Oakridge Communities, which builds homes in Loudoun and Prince William, blames high housing prices, which in Loudoun have reached about $694,000 for a detached house and $426,000 for a townhouse.
"It's just expensive to live in Loudoun. The cost of a single-family home is expensive. The cost of a townhouse is expensive," Gorman said.
By contrast, Lang said, "you could move to Nashville or Atlanta or Columbia, South Carolina, and pay $300,000 for a right fine house. . . . So a lot of the people who are leaving Fairfax may just be bypassing Loudoun and heading straight for those places."
3 comments:
Good points, though, if we are going to be honest (as opposed to the RE industry), a "right fine" house in Atlanta will cost well more than $300K. You'd need to be almost an hour's commute from downtown to find "right fine" at that price. In any event, and following the point of the post, prices there are consistently better, per relative area, than Washington-N.Va.-MD, IMO.
I agree, Chip. It wasn't a very good example.
I've noticed stories about real estate markets cooling in areas like the Raleigh/Durham area. The reason given is that folks can't sell their houses in the bubble areas fast enough to buy them in the less-expensive areas.
The out-migration here may very well be stemmed a bit if our house prices moderate a bit. And they really have already. We've had no real nominal price growth since about Q42004.
I am a native of the Atlanta area. I moved here 2 years ago for a major career advancement and knew before moving that I would NOT buy in the hyper-inflated market in this area. I rent and will do so until I move back further south sometime in the next 4 or 5 years.
To Chip's point, Atlanta metro is different from here in that the vast majority of jobs are NOT inside the Perimeter. The housing market is very strong in the suburbs where a person can buy a brick house with a triple garage in a country club estate subdivison for $475,000.
I had a beautiful home there which was built better and was far more attractive than anything comparable I have seen here. People who live in the Northern suburbs of Atlanta can actually afford well- made homes in safe neighborhoods with local schools that rank in the top 5% of the nation for $225,000 - $300,000.
Major point: salaries are probably 15% to 20% higher here, but a metro Atlanta family can acquire far more real estate and save more than a family DC metro residents. Not as many house poor in the Atlanta area. (Not so for rural parts of Georgia though. There's Atlanta and then the rest of the state.)
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