The Virginian-Pilot
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Home prices in South Hampton Roads fell for the sixth straight month in January, and sales of existing homes dropped steeply.
Both figures are at their lowest point since 2005, according to Real Estate Information Network Inc.
The company released data Friday that showed the median sale price for existing homes in January was $194,000 , down 4.9 percent from $204,000 in December and 13.7 percent from $224,900 a year ago. The median is the point at which half the prices are higher and half are lower. Median prices have declined slowly but steadily in Hampton Roads in recent months.
The local multiple listing service, based in Virginia Beach, also reported that 435 existing homes and condominiums were sold last month in South Hampton Roads. That’s down 31.4 percent from December and down 36.6 percent from 686 in January 2008.
“The prices going down is a good-news, bad-news scenario,” said Dick Thurmond, president of real estate company William E. Wood and Associates. “The prices have needed to come down for the market to get more affordable. We’ve gotten below $200,000. I think we’ve got prices back down to where consumers are going to say, 'That might be the magic number.’”
Thurmond said more sellers need to realize that “to get their houses sold, they need to bring their prices down.” Ron Pearman, regional vice president of Long & Foster Real Estate in Virginia Beach, said potential buyers seem to be active in the market but few are willing to pull the trigger.
“I think the overall thing is people are more unsure than they’ve ever been about job security as a whole,” he said. The data also showed that the number of homes on the market last month in Hampton Roads rose 3.7 percent, to 13,490 from 13,014 in December. That figure includes the Peninsula and outlying regions such as Williamsburg and northeastern North Carolina.
The increase in the number of active listings reversed a trend that saw homes for sale decline in recent months, a common occurrence during fall and winter as sales activity slows and sellers pull properties off the market during the holidays.
“We’re still trying to eat into the inventory,” Pearman said. “This is still just a supply-and-demand business.” The average time on the market for existing homes in all of Hampton Roads was 98 days in January, compared with 89 days at the same point last year.
Josh Brown, (757) 446-2318, josh.brown@pilotonline.com
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MissCharlotte
I don't know where you are getting your info from. The BAH we receive as an E-5 family is enough to keep us in a 3 bedroom apartment in a questionable area (Emerald Point apts). We tried to get a house when we first moved here, but were chagrined to discover that what we qualified for actually would get us a house by the Newport News shipyard. That same amount would have been able to get us a decent house when we lived in Wisconsin though.
Two things
1 - Look up the word "greed". Obviously people don't know what it means.
2 - This article doesn't even mention city assessments.
Notice how quick the cities were to go up on your assessments.
They will not be coming down anytime soon. As far as money for schools and roads. There is plenty of funds for schools and roads, the problem is that the cities seem to think they are in the building, remodeling, development and retail business. It's time to stop all the foolish city "projects" and the "entitlements" and get back to providing only the basic utilities and needs of the city. We get taxed to death so the city/state/federal government can play with our money and redistribute it to who they want to. Turn the charity over to the charities. Leave the development and building to the private developers and builders. Other than the land needed for official government business, sell off properties owned by the city and let it produce tax revenue. It's not the governments place to provide cradle to grave entitlements.
Desirable area
Prices rose here because a lot of retirees moved here from the Northeast. We have mild weather, a nice beach, and relatively cheap housing.
just the tip of the iceberg
And home prices in HRoads are gonna fall a heckuva lot further... according to OFHEO reports, the HRoads housing bubble was the 2nd biggest bubble in the entire nation-- local home prices here skyrocketed higher than in any other MSA in America, except for Honolulu.
Don't believe it? http://www.ofheo.gov/hpi_city.aspx This is the OFHEO website (Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight)-- the Fed agency that oversees Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. OFHEO statistics track long-term changes in home sales prices, going back decades-- not just the "month over month" or "quarter over quarter" changes the NAR uses to juice its numbers.
Check the OHFEO list-- over the past 5 years, from 3rd quarter 2008 back to 3rd quarter 2003, the Va Beach/Norfolk MSA experienced an astronomical house price inflation of 72.58%, outstripped only by Honolulu at 78.73%. I can understand why Honolulu was & is a hotly desirable area, but please-- there was never anything in HRoads to justify its housing bubble.
City appraisals Inflated out of Greed
Most of the homes in my neighborhood were worth about two hundred thousand dollars three years ago. A few people in the neighborhood remodeled their homes with all the finest new bells and whistles; copper gutters, marble floors, granite counter tops, jacuzzi baths, and then sold them for perhaps a little over the three hundred thousand dollar mark. This was during the height of the home value bubble and local realtors were telling us that soon they would be worth much more. A few of the remodels sold and the city said that since the tax appraisal for homes is based on recent home sales, that now all of the homes in the area were worth over three hundred thousand dollars whether they had been remodeled or not. This was done by the city out of sheer greed to collect exorbitant property taxes and now the disastrous result is obvious.
Housing was grossly overvalued
For the first time last year our Chesapeake neighborhood went down in value. When you go from buying homes in the high $100K to being assessed near $500K in 8 years something is very wrong. That's extreme housing inflation. The toll on everyone with taxes has been a sore spot the past couple of years in this city, and no matter how many of us went before city council, we paid increased taxes each year with hundreds of dollars more, while council members played games with tax rates dancing around the assessed property values. Now , hopefully, it will be tough to raise the rates even in the face of decreasing assessment values. This year will be another decline in home value for us. Our city assessor says the neighborhood will drop significantly again - finally some sanity returns to the market.
It's a start. We need to get
It's a start. We need to get back to 2002 prices or so. You still aren't reporting what the average price per square foot is, so who knows what people are getting for that money now as compared to last year or the year before. As far as the military, I don't think the avg military family is bringing in the needed $130K+ avg household to afford the $400K homes that are an abundance. Who knows. In times like these, it's great being a renter. The gov't need to get out of the way, and let all the investors that bought the MBS / CDS to looose! Let the banks LOOSE! Get that inventory on the market, with no reserve auctions. Let speculators step in, buy it, get burned, repeat the cycle over and over until the market stabilizes and we as a country can get back to innovating and creating.
Keep coming down, prices;
Keep coming down, prices; when you inflate artificially for years, this is the consequence.
To quote Once:
...."So, if I am a highly compensated professional I should protest paying for services like schools and fire fighters? When did greed become fashionable?" Regardless of our levels of income, or financial equity, we should protest when we are being assessed unfairly. We should protest when our local rulers spend our money foolishly, or commit us to millions of dollars of present and/or future liabilities, for "feel-good" capital projects, wrapped in the mantra of "progress", that may or may not ever realize the returns on investment that our governmental prestidigitators conjure up in their Power Point, emotion-laden rationales. We should protest, when we spend as much as we do on education, yet find that so many of our kids don't want to go to school because of rampant violence, more than a few ineffective teachers, and some administrators more interested in "keeping the lid on" rather than rocking the boat to cast those who stand between the students and a good education overboard. It's not greed, Once, ...but a search for justice.