You may have seen news articles in the past week noting that Washington area house prices were up 3.8 percent at the end of 2009 from the previous year. It also noted that condominium prices ended 2009 down 1.3 percent from 2008. In the District, the number of sales was up 56 percent in 2009.
The quarterly report from the National Association of Realtors shows that the housing market is stabilizing throughout much of the country and that the federal tax credit and stimulus efforts to keep interest rates low are having a positive impact on the market.
Another local report that looked at the pipeline of new construction inventory in the region found that the new condo/home inventory was cut in half last year. Construction financing has been unavailable since January 2008 and there is no indication of when it may become available. Once a project gets financing, it can take about three years before it is ready to deliver and move-into.
DC Market Snapshot
What does this mean? We are likely to see a shortage of housing inventory in DC in 2011-2014, and there are indications that the shortage may already be here as a number of condo projects have sold out in the past month and the remaining ones have dwindling inventory.
All real estate is local and even in the Washington region, price trends can vary greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood. We’re putting the final touches on our year-end report that looks at the microtrends in 15 DC neighborhoods–not zipcodes. We’ve featured some of the findings for Dupont on this blog and will be posting the findings from all the neighborhoods over the coming two weeks.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }