Monthly Archives: August 2011
Albemarle County Real Estate Market Update – August 2011
What’s happening the Albemarle County real estate market? Lots of stuff. Perhaps the two most relevant posts I’ve written in the past few weeks are these:
- Goodbye, 0-5 Buyer -OR- Finance a House or an Education? in which I discuss the elimination of the short-term homeowner and this effect on the Charlottesville area real estate market
and
- Categorizing the Charlottesville Real Estate Market – in which I break the market down into four segments – from distressed to price aggressively.
This is just a reasonably high-level overview of the Albemarle real estate market. But … this matters little to you if you’re looking for a home in Albemarle, start your home search here. If you’re curious about what’s happening in your location in Albemarle, or are currently searching for homes for sale in Albemarle, please feel free to contact me anytime with questions.
Sold listings are down in Albemarle County year over year:
See also:
Charlottesville MSA Real Estate Market Update – 30 August 2011 – How this matters to You Continue reading
City of Charlottesville Real Estate Market Update – August 2011
The City of Charlottesville Real Estate market continues to be slow. Download the City of Charlottesville Detailed Real Estate Market Report A balanced market is still a ways off.
As I noted in 2006 (Good Lord, it’s been that long that we’ve been searching for a bottom?!)
How do we know that the housing “bust/correction/adjustment” (how about “change”) is over? My answer – when we are able to look back from a perspective of nine to eighteen months and say, “see, here are the data, this is the trend of where we were, and here is where we are.” Until then, speculation about every move – a move of any kind - of the market is just that – speculation, even if it’s educated speculation.
This is just a reasonably high-level overview of the City of Charlottesville’s real estate market. If you’re curious about what’s happening in your location in Charlottesville, or are currently searching for homes for sale in Greene, please feel free to contact me anytime with questions.
Sold listings are up ever so slightly in the City of Charlottesville year over year:
Greene County Real Estate Market Update – August 30 2011
What does this mean? It means simply that the Greene County real estate market – and Greene County itself – is becoming more self-sufficient and independent of Charlottesville-Albemarle (CharlAlbemarle). People are choosing to buy and live in Greene County and don’t have to commute into the City of Charlottesville or Albemarle to work. I’d *love* to see updated commuting data from the US Census.
This is just a reasonably high-level overview of the Greene County real estate market. If you’re curious about what’s happening in your location in Greene, or are currently searching for homes for sale in Greene, please feel free to contact me anytime with questions.
Sold listing volume is down just a bit in Greene County year over year:
Shopper’s World Continues to Decline
Good news: some banks are lending again.
No word yet on any traffic improvements to alleviate what presumably will be a few more turns in and out of the new shopping center.
Not so good news: Shoppers World continues to decline and traffic is likely to get more congested on 29 North. Continue reading
Charlottesville MSA Real Estate Market Update – August 2011 – How This Matters to You
Pending Contracts in the Charlottesville MSA are UP, year over year. But if you’re looking to buy a home in the Charlottesville area or if you’re trying to or thinking about selling, this number doesn’t matter to you one bit. What matters is – what is the market doing on my street? In my neighborhood? In my elementary school district? What happens at the top level – national, state, MSA, locality – is darn near irrelevant other than from a psychological point of view.
Here is why the top numbers don’t matter … there are extremes and outliers everywhere; today’s example:
A house just went under contract in the Bentivar neighborhood. A first look says that the house came on the market at $595k and went under contract in 6 days. If that house sells for $595k, the MLS data will show that it sold for 100% of its asking price. Which isn’t accurate.
- The house first came on the market in February 2010 for $1,100,000.
- Reduced to $835,000
- Came back on the market at $833,000
- Reduced to $735,000
- Came on the market for $595,000
- Went under contract quickly.
Look beyond the numbers presented to you. Here and everywhere. Good real estate professionals don’t try to hide the information, but it takes work to discover what’s actually happening.
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Public Education: A Frightening Essay
It’s rare that I read something that I share everywhere; this story is first in a long time. The Schools We Need: When public education fails, democracy fails with it
Pulling a few choice paragraphs from this piece is unfair – unfair to the author, the concepts, the theories and conclusions and to you. Read the whole thing.
Charlottesville is a Great College Town
But we already knew Charlottesville is a cool college town, Southern Living. What we didn’t know is that we had a Belmont “quarter.” We do have an area of Charlottesville called “Belmont” . Here’s a bit of information about Belmont I wrote back in 2007.… Continue reading…
Goodbye, 0-5 Buyer -OR- Finance a House or an Education?
We’re in the midst of a reset in the real estate market cycle. Every market is different, and we’ve been seeking “new normal” for quite some time.
Here’s part of the new normal, not just in the Charlottesville real estate market, but across society as well. (search for “new normal” on RealCentralVA for context)
The buyers who would buy and sell in a zero to five year timeframe are gone. In other words, the stepping stone of the “buying a home” lifecycle has been pushed further.
First time homebuyers, when they do choose to buy, are buying at later points of their lives – once they’ve established themselves in their careers* and found their mates if they so choose, and have determined that their lives – kids on the way, jobs … some sort of stability.
Many of these first-timers have either seen their friends and families decimated by the housing market or have experienced it themselves in selling or trying to sell – either normal transactions, short sales or foreclosures.
…
A report last fall indicated that student debt in America had reached $850 billion, nearly $25 billion more than the nation’s consumer credit card debt load.
Homeownership is a long-term decision. Given the choice – which are the next (current) generation of homebuyers going to choose -
Higher education or a home of their own?
The new normal, for the foreseeable future, is one without the 0-5 year buyers, one with an extended lifecycle of homeownership. And you know what? If we can just get the government to get the hell out of the way – stop making secret loans to banks, stop toying with being landlords, stop catering to the banks, stop trying to manipulate mortgages, and let the market work.
