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Lake Anne Resident & Realtor, All Reston Real Estate
Housing Market: What to Believe?
Values up, values down. When listening to the real estate news it's important to think local.
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Every day we hear a new message about the housing market, good news, bad news, and lots of contradictions. These are just of few of the headlines that have come across my email in the last four days.
- “Housing Crisis will End in 2012 as Banks Loosen Credit Standards”: Loose standards never sound good to me, but of course it’s a good thing if more people are able to get financing so they can buy homes rather than rent. In Florida, where 11.9 percent of mortgages are in foreclosure, its really hard to imagine that the crisis will be over this year.
- "Window of Opportunity Beginning to Close for Sellers”: The premise of this article is that there are still a lot of homes in the foreclosure pipeline and that the recent agreement reached between the Federal Government and major banks will allow the banks to push this inventory into the market place in the next 30-90 days. The more supply of homes on the market the more downward pressure on price. Absolutely true, but not a huge factor in Reston.
- “Price Declines put 400K More Homeowners Underwater”: There is a huge number of homeowners with five percent or less equity in their homes. Seasonal price dips, more housing supply due to increased foreclosures quickly push these owners into negative territory. This could be true for any homeowner, anywhere. But it's only a factor if you're thinking of selling.
So what’s a homeowner to believe? Well, each situation is true somewhere, but none of them is true everywhere. This is why I rarely use Facebook to share these industry articles that come across my email. They need context to make sense and the headlines themselves can be alarming. Context for real estate is always local. Your neighborhood, your cluster, your condo, your street. It’s very difficult to apply nationally aggregated numbers to your zip code.
Reston’s market is doing slightly better this year over last year for same time period. Our year to date numbers for 2012 are 101 properties sold at $36,000,000 versus 100 properties sold at $33,000,000. in 2011. It’s great to see prices are trending up.
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DRHILL
12:44 pm on Saturday, March 3, 2012
Nice to see prices trending up, unless you're a buyer! Reston is expensive, some of us will have to look elsewhere :(
Eve Thompson
4:19 pm on Saturday, March 3, 2012
Don't despair- it might take some effort but Reston has a pretty broad range of prices.
Anne Cissel
4:58 pm on Saturday, March 3, 2012
We own a condo and our assessment keeps going down. Are condos the last thing to recover in a downturn? We owe more on our mortgage than the county thinks the condo's worth at this point. We fear there were a lot of short sales in our condo unit that are pulling our value down.
Eve Thompson
9:45 pm on Saturday, March 3, 2012
Hi Anne,
the condo market was hit harder than other market segments. Mostly because there were so many new projects that were still hitting the market just as the downturn began. The fact that your assessed value is less than your mortgage is NOT necessarily an indication that your condo is worth less. What matters is the value as determined by recent sales. Where is your condo?
Donna Sandin
7:25 am on Sunday, March 4, 2012
After nearly 30 years in this Reston home, I will have to sell next Spring in order to move to a retirement community. Everyone says that with Metro coming, it will be much easier to get a good price, that Reston is still very much sought-after by buyers. The future Town Center station is years away - so will the Wiehle station help us much? From my cluster, someone could walk to Wiehle station in 25 mins if they took the W and OD trail.
Eve Thompson
8:09 am on Sunday, March 4, 2012
Hi Donna,
You are correct that Reston continues to be a very desirable place to live. Our inventory is very low which tends to favor the seller, except that the buyers are very, very aware of the market in general; meaning that they come well armed with comparable data. Houses that come on the market over priced tend to sit, and sit and sit.
Regarding an increase in value due to Metro. We will undoubtedly experience an initial bump. The closer to the Metro the better the bump. A 25 minute walk is further than most people will walk. The rule of thumb is 10 city blocks; however if your home is accessible via the WO&D you could certainly market that aspect, its easily bikeable.
Unfortunately its not possible to predict what Spring a year from now will bring. Things seem to be moving in the right direction, and there's no reason to expect that they won't continue to do so. You should take a hard look at your place to see what improvements or other pre-sale prep you should be doing now to be in the best possible shape when you do list. Feel free to call me if you'd like a home valuation report or ideas on what things you might want to do this year to be ready to sell next year.
Skip Endale
10:47 am on Thursday, April 5, 2012
Zillow expects the resurgence in foreclosures this year, combined with excess inventory of unsold, bank-owned homes will contribute to a 3.7 percent national decline in prices before the market hits bottom in 2013 and stays there until 2016.
According to leading broker dealer Amherst Securities, some 9.5 million homes are still at risk of default and in February it said it expected to see the uptick in foreclosures start to hit in March and April. There is other evidence that many of the foreclosures that did not happen in 2011 will happen this year.
Lesson learned from 5 years ago: don't trust your realtor. They have a one sided view of things to come.