Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Northern Virginia Bits Bucket 10/22/08

Please post your local house search updates, MLS finds, on-topic ideas, and links here.

Posted by Harriet at 12:04 AM

6 comments:

MM said...

from Darcy @ WTOP

Home sales under $400K are up

The sales of homes under $400,000 rose 70 percent in Alexandria and Arlington and Fairfax counties...

10/22/08, 12:09 PM  
TedK said...

mm,

I thought conforming loans are no longer capped at $417K. It is something like $729K now and will be $625 K next year. Wondering why John McClain says it is $417K.

10/22/08, 12:30 PM  
contrarian said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
10/22/08, 12:36 PM  
CRT said...

MM - I think if you aggregate Arlington Alex & FFX, sales under 400K are up, but I would bet most of that is due to fairfax which is twice the size of Arl & Alex combined. I may be wrong but I dont think Arl & Alex are seeing sales that strong in the low end.

TedK - I thought that too. It makes me even more skeptical of anything that comes out of McClain's mouth (or it may just be WTOP's abysmal reporting).

Contrarian - its interesting to compare those charts to what we see here locally. Compared to the nation, NOVA inventory peaked 2 years ago and hasnt returned:

http://www.recharts.com/nova/nova.html

regarding our local months of inventory, NOVA homes are selling twice as well as the national average - even hard hit places like PWC are far ahead of the national average at this point.

Will we continue to be the league leaders, or will the mess on the national scale drag us back down again?

My guess is a bit of both. In a vacuum, the metrics of NOVA make it look like an area poised for a recovery. That said, when you see how bad it still looks on a national scale, its looks like a local recovery is still pretty far away.

10/22/08, 1:16 PM  
MM said...

crt:

i thought he's saying all three jurisdictions are each seeing a 70% increase?

but anyways, i don't think there are that many properties under 400K in Ale and Arl so even though i only track 2 Arl zipcodes, i find that believable percentage-wise.

10/22/08, 1:32 PM  
CRT said...

MM - I just checked it out - its a mixed picture. In Arl & Alex sales (Sept08 vs 07) are not up 70% but they are still up YOY.

In a way thats surprising to me. One of the original suggestions behind the "correction is moving in" theory was that low end sales inside the beltway are still down (thus if high end only was selling, median prices would skew high).

I always thought that was possible, but given that low end sales are up (YOY) it looks like thats not the case. Interesting...

10/22/08, 10:14 PM  

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