The Washington Post examines the local housing market

According to The Washington Post, 62% of Washington, D.C. area home sellers are selling at a loss:

In the past six months, most Washington area sellers have lost money on houses they purchased since prices started climbing in 2000, according to a Washington Post analysis of residential sales. In the first three months of this year, 62 percent of local home sellers accepted less than they paid for their homes, in part because aggressively priced foreclosures have dragged down prices around the region.

While the drop is painful for sellers, experts say it is a necessary part of getting past the excesses of the boom years. This region experienced one of the sharpest run-ups in home prices in the nation. Those prices must be brought down in order for buyers and sellers to deal with each other on more equal footing, as they had for decades before the boom. ...

But as long as distress sales continue to dominate, the market will not bounce back to normal, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of Harvard University's center for housing studies. "The norm requires that a preponderance of transactions take place between willing buyers and sellers, not sellers who would take any price to unload a property." ...

Home prices have held steady in the District, according to The Post analysis. In the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, prices for single-family homes are down to where they were five years ago. In Prince William and Loudoun counties, a flood of foreclosures has pushed prices so low that bargain hunters have flocked there in recent months, helping to boost sales.

But while in past slumps a surge in sales has signaled the start of a rebound, this downturn is unlike any in recent times and it's premature to call a recovery, said Barry Merchant, senior housing policy analyst at the Virginia Housing Development Authority.

The encouraging signs have been offset by more troublesome ones, he said. After tapering off for a few months, foreclosures in Northern Virginia are starting to creep up again and may keep climbing now that several lenders have lifted foreclosure moratoriums.

Meanwhile, the year-over-year sales increases of the past few months are petering out in some Virginia suburbs, suggesting that interest in the fire-sale prices may have peaked, Merchant said. In April, Loudoun sales declined 12.5 percent from a year earlier.