Ethical Homes» arlington

Easily Contact Hypothermia Shelters in the DC area

sweth — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:35:38 +0000

As we prepare in the DC area for what’s expected to be our first big snowfall of the season, many of the area’s homeless population will find themselves without adequate shelter; here are some phone numbers that every local resident should keep handy so that they can request assistance for anyone they see who might need it during the upcoming weeks.

DC’s hypothermia hotline is the model that all other local jurisdictions should seek to emulate; if you see a homeless person in need of assistance inside the District, just call their hotline and they will send someone out to provide them with blankets, gloves, etc., as well as transportation to the nearest shelter if needed.

DC Hypothermia Hotline: 800-535-7252

Unfortunately, most Northern Virginia jurisdictions appear to rely solely on individual (often privately-run) shelters to assist with hypothermia during the winter and do not have any sort of specific centralized hotline that you can call. In our experience, however, calls in those jurisdictions to the local non-emergency police numbers will usually result in an officer at least checking on the person in need of assistance and often assisting in getting them to shelter. Those non-emergency police numbers are:

Alexandria Non-Emergency Police: 703-838-4444
Arlington County Non-Emergency Police: 240-777-4000
Fairfax County Non-Emergency Police: 703-691-2131
Falls Church Non-Emergency Police: 703-241-5053

Local Maryland jurisdictions do have centralized hotlines, but the staffs at those hotlines often can’t assist in the pickup of people in need, so we are providing the numbers for both the hotlines and the local non-emergency police dispatchers:

Montgomery County Community Crisis Center: 240-777-4000
Montgomery County Non-Emergency Police: 301-279-8000
Prince George’s County Homeless Hotline: 888-731-0999
Prince George’s County Non-Emergency Police: 301-333-4000

(These are the contact numbers for the jurisdictions closest to Washington DC; if you know of the appropriate contact info for other jurisdictions in the Metro DC area, please let us know and we would be glad to add them to this page.)

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Foreclosure Listings Temporarily On Hold

sweth — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:54:16 +0000

Due to some technical issues that we’re currently trying to resolve, we’ve had to put the public foreclosure listings on hold temporarily; in the interim, if you’re interested in seeing the foreclosure listings for a specific area, please contact us and let us know what area you’re interested in and we can send you those listings directly or set you up with an automatic search to email them to you regularly.

For those who are interested, the specific problem is that MRIS, the local multiple listing company through whom we were posting those foreclosure listings, recently added some features to their software, including the ability for users to tag properties that they might be interested in. The problem is that for public listings like these, that “feature” was more of a bug, since there is no way for their software to distinguish between the hundreds of different anonymous visitors who were reviewing the listings; as a result, everyone’s “favorite” properties were all mixed together, so that everyone could see each others’ listings and there was no way to know which ones were yours.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no simple way to turn those features off, and the confusion among the people who were contacting us after they saw other people’s listings in “their” list was just too much to deal with, so for now we’ve had to suspend the public listings. It’s a perfect example of unintended consequences–MRIS had simply never thought about the possibility that more than one person would be viewing a particular posted set of listings–and we’re busy working with them to get this resolved in a way that will let us resume those postings, hopefully this week.

Again, if you’re interested in seeing the foreclosure listings for a specific area, please contact us and let us know what area you’re interested in.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Arlington County & the City of Falls Church (Week of 8/2/09)

sweth — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:18:21 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Arlington, VA and Falls Church, VA for the week of 8/2.

Basic information for each new or changed bank-owned property from the last week is provided in that list, as well as pictures and virtual tours (if available); we also include the address, so if you are potentially interested, you can feel free to drive by the property to take a look from the outside on your own.

(If you’re new to our bank-owned inventory lists, be sure to check the archives for any listings from previous weeks that might still be available.)

If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

We are also in the process of setting up regular tours of all of the foreclosure inventory in Arlington & Falls Church; if you would be interested in participating in one of those tours, please contact us and we’d be glad to notify you when those tours begin.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Arlington County & the City of Falls Church (Week of 7/26/09)

sweth — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:51:33 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Arlington, VA and Falls Church, VA for the week of 7/26.

(If you’re new to our bank-owned inventory lists, be sure to check the archives for any listings from previous weeks that might still be available.)

If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

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Sustainable Real Estate Roundup

sweth — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:07:16 +0000

Here’s a quick overview of some recent area news of interest to people interested in sustainable/green real estate and communities.

On the more directly real-estate-related front, the “700 SIX” office building just opened in downtown DC as a LEED Platinum building, indicating that they are at the cutting edge of sustainable design and construction. DCmud has some more details on the new development in DC’s still-gentrifying Chinatown. (Another recent LEED Platinum building to open in DC is the headquarters of the USGBC; since USGBC is one of the driving forces behind LEED, though, that’s not nearly as good of an example of how the local market is embracing green construction in general and the LEED system in particular.

Much of the rest of the sustainability news recently has been focused on transit issues. Greater Greater Washington gives a good roundup of recent bicycle transit-related news from DC’s Department of Transportation (DDOT), including the addition of new bike lanes, and proposed legislation to require office buildings to allow people to bring bicycles in with them if they bike to work. Meanwhile, DCmud notes that as part of the deal to have DC subsidize the construction of the long-delayed Marriott Marquis adjacent to the DC Convention Center, DDOT is asking Marriott to install new SmartBike stations.

On the rail transit front, Arlington County announced that they are going to attempt to have the Columbia Pike corridor removed from Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) control in order to give them more freedom to move forward with light rail plans for that corridor. In less encouraging area light rail news, though, one analyst predicts a five year wait before DC finally opens light rail lines along the H Street corridor, despite the fact that DC has already purchased the cars for those lines.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Arlington & Falls Church (Week of 7/19/09)

sweth — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:24:10 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Arlington County and the City of Falls Church.

Basic information for each property is provided in that list, as well as pictures and virtual tours (if available); we also include the address, so if you are potentially interested, you can feel free to drive by the property to take a look from the outside on your own. If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

We are also in the process of setting up regular tours of all of the foreclosure inventory in Arlington and Falls Church; if you would be interested in participating in one of those tours, please contact us and we’d be glad to notify you when those tours begin.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Arlington & Falls Church (Week of 7/12/09)

sweth — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:48:09 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Arlington County and the City of Falls Church.

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June 2009 NoVa Housing Statistics

sweth — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:17:30 +0000

The June 2009 statistics are in for the Northern Virginia housing market.

Here are the initial NVAR/MRIS statistics for June 2009 home sales activity for Fairfax and Arlington counties, the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church and the towns of Vienna, Herndon and Clifton.

A total of 2,169 homes sold in June 2009, a 14.16 percent increase above June 2008 home sales of 1,900.
Active listings decreased by 27 percent from last year, with 7,617 active listings in June, compared with 10,440 homes available in June 2008. The average days on market (DOM) for homes in June 2009 decreased by 14.46 percent to 71 days, compared with 83 days in June 2008.
Sales prices continue to remain lower than those realized last year. The average sales price in June fell by 7.42 percent from June 2008, to $451,354, compared with last June’s average of $487,549.
The median price of homes sold in Northern Virginia in June was $392,367, which is a decline of 5.68 percent compared with June 2008′s median price of $416,000.
The number of pending home sales in Northern Virginia in June shows an increase of 17.12 percent at 2,463 compared to 2,103 in June 2008.

Sales activity in Greater Northern Virginia (the above jurisdictions plus Prince William, Loudoun and the Greater Piedmont counties) for June 2009 shows a very slight increase from June 2008.

The number of Greater Northern Virginia region homes sold in June was 3,657, a 2 percent increase from June 2008′s total of 3,586 sales.
Along with the increase in home sales for June, there was also an increase in the number of pending home sales, from June 2008′s 4,054 to 4,465 pending sales in June 2009, a 10.14 percent climb.
The average sales price of $382,980 in June 2009 continues to lag behind the 2008 average by only 6.91 percent. The June 2008 average sales price was $411,388.
Across Greater Northern Virginia, the number of listings showed a decrease from 2008 numbers, with 14,730 listings active, which is 34.54 percent less than this time last year, when 22,501 homes were available.
The average DOM for a home sold in June 2009 was 75 compared with last year’s 99 DOM, a decrease of 23.88 percent.

These numbers reflect a summary of a wide variety of areas; market trends in individual area within the larger market can vary significantly from the summary values, sometimes by as much as 50% or more. Here are links to the statistics for individual jurisdictions within Northern Virginia:

If you would like to see the statistics for other specific cities or counties, or for a specific zip code or neighborhood, let us know and we’d be glad to send them to you.

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Remy’s Arlington

sweth — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:50:50 +0000

Local comic Remy recently posted a parody rap that is sure to take the interwebs by storm (at least in the DC area).

Given how trite the “dorky white person does gangster rap” parody genre has become, Remy’s take on Arlington (which is really more of a look at a certain subsection of the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor along the Orange Line in N. Arlington) is surprisingly amusing–and not just because the kitchen in which a large part of the video is filmed is a design that’s been very popular in local upscale condo developments recently, or because we have met with clients in at least 15 of the 16 Starbucks locations mentioned.

(Warning: slightly NSFW language.)

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Testimonial from Greg & Lorena S.

sweth — Fri, 04 May 2007 20:46:28 +0000

Greg & Lorena S. were an expat couple looking to make a purchase despite a very unusual financing situation; working with Ethical Homes, they were able to buy a great home with a mortgage that didn’t penalize them for their unique finances.

They were coming to the U.S. for nine months of training at the State Department before their next post abroad, and were hoping to purchase a home that would be convenient for them while they were in training but that they could rent out once they went to their next post. Finding a mortgage was going to be difficult, though: Lorena was a Colombian citizen with no credit history in the U.S., Greg had been abroad for so long that he had almost no recent credit history, and both of their incomes would be dropping while they were in training and going back up again once they got to their next post, so the other lenders that Greg & Lorena had spoken with didn’t think that they would be able to make a purchase. Ethical Homes worked with Greg & Lorena before they even got to the U.S. to help them understand their options and the homes that would best fit their needs, and to find a terrific mortgage that gave them a great rate despite their unusual situation. And once they got into town, one of our expert buyer agents was able to find them a home just a block from the State Department facility where they would be in training–after just one day of searching!

Greg & Lorena say:

A friend at the Embassy referred us to Ethical Homes, and we began working with Sweth when we were still several months away from moving back to the United States. With a couple of interviews, he had arranged for an internet search of properties that might interest us, as well as providing a number of very creative financing options for us. This advance planning allowed us to make the best use of our time after we returned. In fact, it only took us one day to find the property we now live in! During the period when we were purchasing the home, Ethical Homes continued to work with us to make sure we understood all of our options, dealing with both the seller and the financing aspects of the purchase. Because of our extended time outside the country, and our plans to leave again this summer, I know that our questions about financing required a lot of creativity. Ethical Homes found a great solution that works extremely well for us, and Sweth stayed on top of our lender to make sure that closing went seamlessly. The most outstanding parts of our experience with Ethical Homes were without a doubt the responsiveness and flexibility we got at every step of the way. From taking quite a lot of time with us at the beginning of the process, when we were not even in the country, to running numbers time and time again to make sure we understood what different changes would mean to us both immediately and down the line, Ethical Homes made us comfortable with our decisions both on the property we picked and on how we financed it. I’d recommend their services strongly.

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