[quote=CA renter][quote=eavesdropper]
Nicely done on the sale, eavesdropper. 🙂
Thanks for filling us in on what’s going on in your market. From everything I’m hearing and reading, it sounds like your area is doing exceptionally well. Of course, like here, there are areas that have held up better than others.
The market’s still crazy here, if that’s any kind of forward-indicator for you. We’ll see if this changes over the next year or two.[/quote]
Thanks, CA renter. We were extremely fortunate. Within a less than a year, sale prices of the houses in our development had dropped by $100K (but, damn, I miss the closet space!)
Sale prices in our new development have actually gone up a bit. Not enough to be statistically significant, but, oh, so much better than dropping. But I’m convinced we’ve got a way to go before things bottom out here.
Northern VA seems to be having a much tougher time of it than we on the MD side of DC. But their growth during the aughts was much less controlled than ours, mostly in the exurbs. Individuals buying new construction for $250,000 were seeing their appraisals go up to $325K before building was complete, and “values” were at $500K+ before the wake-up call. I think that they were double-whammied by the high commuting costs in 2008 in addition to changing market conditions.
But even though I believe that our market is far from bottoming out, we do have a certain stability in the employment sector lent by the presence of the Federal government. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don’t think that makes us recession-proof, but it’s a helluva lot more than most areas have these days.
But I am curious about one thing that’s been discussed in this thread: Denial. Is it as strong in your neck of the woods as it is here (documented for posterity on “Real Estate Intervention”)? Time and time again, I meet people who readily acknowledge the severity of the real estate crisis, but, somehow, feel that their home is different, and that they’ll have no problem charging, and getting, significantly more money for it. Is denial still as prevalent in SoCal as it is here, or are most sellers finally getting the message (before the “message” comes from their mortgage lender)?
