Is the Charlottesville Market Going to Crash?

I held another Charlottesville Reddit real estate AMA this week, and as always, there are some fantastic questions.

Over / under on the housing market crashing in the next year or so?

OR: will I ever be able to buy a home 😭

My answer

Crash? I doubt it. (hopefully mild) correction? I think that’s a reasonable expectation.

I think a crash would mean that things have gone completely sideways – a total stock (AI) market correction, layoffs, more wars, and all sorts of things that we can imagine and also hope don’t happen. The 2026 real estate market is not the 2006-2009 real estate market; loans are reasonably difficult/achievable to get and the No doc/no income loans don’t exist (as far as I know).

Someone said this to me last year:

“I’m glad I didn’t wait for rates or prices to drop to buy; we’ve been in our home for two years and we’re happy.”

• I think if rates come down, more buyers will enter the market, leveling/increasing prices.
• We are entering a phase (I think) of more inventory as people have more life changes – downsizing, upsizing, combining households – kids + parents, parents + grandparents, kids + parents + grandparents – and that’s is likely to keep stability in our market.
• I also think (yes, this is an acknowledged bias, that we are going to continue to see people move to the Charlottesville area because of climate change. The Great Displacement is an extraordinary book.
• Right now, there are some real deals to be had in the new construction/spec world.

Will you be able to buy a home? Knowing nothing about you, I’d bet you could buy a home now, but maybe not the or the type of home you really want, where you want.

Another great question that made me curious

Trend-wise, are the surrounding counties leading, following, or going down their own path (relative to Albemarle) in terms of market direction (e.g. softening, strengthening, muddling along)? I realize Orange isn’t Unionville, and Mineral isn’t Zions, but broad strokes?

My answer

A note: Orange is a bit different, as is the north east of Louisa as they are in a different MLS – and they’re really far away. I don’t have full visibility into that data, and this fragmentation is an ongoing realtor political battle; I’ll be writing more about this soon.

There’s a challenge with some of the data, as big builders (Lennar, Toll, etc) don’t necessarily put their data into the MLS.

Louisa: Slower and softer. Contracts fell 13% and closings 5%, with fewer new listings. Median days to contract rose to 40 from 30, and 55% of resales cut their price first. CAAR (which doesn’t include the overlapping MLS) counts 19% more active listings. My pull likely misses about 20% of Louisa’s sales, mostly cheaper ones, so treat the $495,000 median as high and read Louisa for direction only.

Greene: Contracts look like they fell off a cliff (−27%), but that’s builders. (see my note above) Resale contracts slipped only from 68 to 60, while new-construction contracts fell from an unusual 75 back to 45. (again, we don’t necessarily have all the data) Resales did slow: 35 days to contract vs. 24.5, and about half cut their price. The median is flat at $402,970, and CAAR counts 38% more active listings.

Over the mountain (the answer to Charlottesville/Albemarle’s affordable housing challenge)

Augusta: The steadiest of the four. (again, we don’t have all the big builder data – notice a trend?) Sales and contracts were flat, new listings rose 24%. Homes still go under contract in a median of 18 days. The median jumped 9% to $395,000 … bigger homes sold; values didn’t necessarily rise 9%.

Waynesboro: Total sales were flat, but resale closings fell 21% while new-construction closings rose 50%, to 42% of all sales. (builder note, again) The overall median rose 4%, but the resale median fell 2% to $308,000. Active listings are up 41%. Owners of existing homes are competing with builders for buyers. — I was in one of the new build townhomes last year and the sales rep said that ~50% of their buyers were UVA/Charlottesville buyers)

That said, I (ok, help from Claude) put these together:

• Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, Nelson market report
• Waynesboro, Augusta market report

If there’s interest, I’ll do these quarterly (mainly because I find them interesting and I’m a real estate dork)

…

Interesting, thank you. I would have thought Louisa would have been more steady state given its position between Richmond and C’ville but it seems it is heavily affordability driven more than anything right now (though that’s not surprising given everything these days).

I think it’s a function of driving to qualify, and product mix. You can get a bigger house for less (not factoring in time/fuel/etc) in Louisa than you can in Charlottesville and Albemarle.