Friday, October 17, 2008

Washington DC metro area home prices

The Washington Times has graphs for the area's counties.
Posted by at 6:12 AM

7 comments:

  1. noneOctober 17, 2008 8:18 AM

    Too bad the median price is such a useless metric.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 17, 2008 9:44 AM

    Agreed, but is there anything better out there that is localized? Case Shiller is great, but given the various degrees of implosion by county, it renders it almost worthless.

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  3. noneOctober 17, 2008 10:34 AM

    If you trust MLS data, and have access to it, that could be interesting. Otherwise wait for localities to report transactions.

    While you wait there's always observation and common sense, and great big grains of salt to be taken with the advice of those who stand to profit from your decision :)

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  4. AnonymousOctober 17, 2008 12:50 PM

    We do have access to MLS data you know:

    http://www.mris.com/reports/stats/

    I generally trust it. I see no profit in showing (last year) places like PWC had 20 months of standing inventory to work through!

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  5. AnthonyOctober 17, 2008 5:56 PM

    Patience, do you believe because of the volatility of the market that the median price is useless? I have seen spikes in my townhome community such as a peak of $463,000 back in 2006 and a recent low listing price of $275,000. That is about a 41% differential.

    Anthony Darmiento

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  6. noneOctober 18, 2008 2:17 PM

    I believe it is useless for a couple of reasons. Due to the extremely low level of sales, it is very easy to skew high or low - in some zip codes, just sell two high-priced houses or two low-priced houses in one month and the median varies wildly.

    Also, it doesn't tell you what the buyer got for their money. Theoretically you could go from selling 1BR condos at 400K to selling McMansions at 400K and if you only look at the median you think prices are holding steady. In many close-in areas you can find both condos and McMansions, so that is not far-fetched at all.

    A more meaningful metric would be average sold price/square foot, but even with that, the low number of sales makes it easy to skew figures. Really we won't know how bad it all is until the dust settles. That's why I zero in on specific areas. When I see a house come back on the market a year later after sitting for a year and getting pulled, and the asking price is 75K less, that tells me something about what's going on that the statistics don't show yet.

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  7. AnonymousOctober 21, 2008 3:13 PM

    Interesting to see how close Montgomery County, Washington DC, and Howard County real estate prices are in Sept. 2008, especially as there were some mighty big differences in the past.

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