Ethical Homes

The volume of real estate news available on the web has been increasing over the last year, as has the number of clients I’ve been helping to buy and sell homes, and the number of consumers contacting me to request information about things other than local real estate news; as a result, I’ve found myself without the time to adequately respond to every article out there that I want to let consumers know about.

Starting today, then, I’ll be forgoing most posts about individual real estate news articles, and instead periodically summarizing the relevant news in a single post; hopefully, this will give me more time to focus on adding more original content to the website, in addition to working with existing and future clients.

On with the summary (which this week will actually include a few of articles from the last few months that have been lingering in my “need to discuss on the website” list):

The market is slowing, but no popping bubbles in sight

The biggest real estate news of the last few months, of course, is that the local market has finally slowed down; sellers who assumed the market would continue to skyrocket and thus marked their properties up 10% over the last sale in the neighborhood (because that’s what everyone did for the last few years) are now finding those properties lingering on the market. Those sellers formed a temporary glut on the market, and since many of them hadn’t anticipated their home staying unsold for so long, many were forced to lower their prices; that in turn reigned in or even lowered prices for newer homes coming on the market—the long-anticipated market correction.

Experts note that that correction isn’t a bubble bursting, however, and while new home construction has slowed tremendously as a result of the cooling market, that very same slowdown shold prevent oversupplies down the line, which should in turn prevent any collapse of the market; most economists still predict that the local market will stabilize on single-digit annual appreciation.

Tips for selling in a slowing market

Both Kenneth Harney and Anthony Carr discuss how sellers in the slowing market can make their properties more appealing by offering subsidies towards buyer closing costs, or providing seller financing to buyers. Both can be very effective techniques to get a property sold, but need to be handled carefully. Among other things, lenders can often be very restrictive on how large such seller subsidies can be and towards what closing costs they can be applied, and buyers who are promised a subsidy that they later find out is disallowed by the lender can become very irritable; sellers should also make sure that their agents understand the math underlying any such offers, and that those agents are knowledgeable in how to best market those deals to buyers—without hard numbers to show them what the difference is to their bottom line, most buyers wouldn’t be any more likely to buy a property with favorable financing terms, and unfortunately most buyers agents don’t understand the relevant math well enough to explain the benefits to their clients, either.

Lots of DC Neighborhoods starting to turn upwards

Even as the local market finally slows down, many neighborhoods in DC that have historically been more “transitional” are finally showing signs of resurgence, including the New York Avenue and H Street corridors in NE DC, and a variety of neighborhoods across the Anacostia River in SE DC.