Anecdotally, real estate agents in the Metro DC area have been seeing the local market stabilizing; statistics are now coming in to confirm that properties are taking longer to sell and that sellers can no longer assume prices will increase from one sale to the next.
A recent article in the Washington Post does a better-than-usual job of not over-hyping these trends, interviewing lots of people with actual knowledge of the market, all of whom say what knowledgeable people have been saying about the local market for the last 3 years–that the skyrocketing appreciation wasn't sustainable, but that barring a local economic catastrophe the growth would end with a levelling off or slight decline, rather than a crash.
The Post writers just can’t resist throwing in a little gratuitous fear-mongering, however, ending the article with anecdotes from people implying that prices are heading rapidly down. It’s worth noting that the only real estate professional that they could find to say that the market is turning to a buyer’s market (where prices will fall) had been a licensed agent for less than a year when they interviewed him, and thus has never actually participated in a buyer’s market. (That’s not to say that prices won’t ever fall, of course, especially in the outer suburbs, but the high job growth and tight supply of housing in the DC core make it unlikely that we’ll see a serious downturn in that core market unless the local economy hits some extremely rough waters.)
Possibly related posts (automatically generated):
- More on the expanding scope of Metro DC
- Multiple Listing Service (MLS)
- Local Commercial Market Seeing Slowdown
- Real Estate News Roundup
- Real Estate News Roundup
- Suburban Metro DC now extends to W. Va.
- Turnaround continues in Anacostia
- CMA
- More on the Anacostia Waterfront
- Happy Birthday, Ethical Homes
