Posted on 05/28/2013 10:24:15 AM PDT by posterchild
Bidding wars are breaking out. Foreign buyers are moving in. A new wave of contemporary architecture is taking hold. And a growing class of tech executives is helping to fuel the boom.
All this is happening in Washington, D.C., a town known for its relative affordability compared with cities such as New York and San Francisco, and for architecture about as exciting as its fashion sense. Today, home prices in Washington and its surrounding suburbs are rapidly rising to new levels.
As other American cities have been buffeted by an uneven economy, Washington's property market has been buoyed two forces specific to the capital city: a surge of federal contractors and a rising tide of government spending. The result: what real-estate agents and developers are calling an unprecedented real-estate surge.
"Buyers are clamoring for high-end product, and homes are selling in a day," says Chris Ballard, principal and founder of real-estate firm McWilliams Ballard. "We are getting all-cash offers with no contingencies on lots of propertiesstuff we would have never seen a year ago."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Blame it on the sequester.
What is the name of the capital in Hunger Games? I hope they don’t muck up the plot of Catching Fire.
“Boomtown”? Then why does so much of it look rundown and diseased?
Obama lied when he said there were no shovel ready jobs after porkuls passed; the shovel ready jobs were building street after street of million dollar homes in VA and MD.
It’s just “Capital District”. DC in reverse. And the Hunger Games have been going for years. . .
May the EBT always be in your favor !!
I agree. My home in Annapolis in 2007 was worth 1.2 million. I purchased the home in 2011....a huge steal. And of course Maryland is going up up up so someday it will be the 2007 appraisal. People should be buying the home of their dreams the last three-four years. So many bargains and less expensive homes out there. This is the time to buy. We will NEVER be in this incredibly great position ever again in our lives (at least anyone over 30).
Thank you for pointing this out. I am sick of people saying that housing in the DC area is reaching or exceeding its peak, when it clearly isn’t. I pay close attention to prices in NOVA (and have for 10+ years), and it is not even close. Maybe in certain isolated areas it is, but not for the vast majority of NOVA.
Here in No. Virginia, our house is up 10% from our purchase price in 2008. That’s the tax assessment, anyway.
That tax assessment was a typical bait-and-switch by the Dems in control of Fairfax County. When home prices tanked (ours went down 5% after we bought it) they raised the property tax, saying “since values declined, we’d actually be paying less tax.” Right. Now values are way up, and they’re talking about ANOTHER tax increase on top of that first one.
It’s like the Palace of Versailles.
“its good to be(livin near)the king “
I was in Manassas right outside DC recently and went yard sale-ing. There were hundreds 750k homes occupied by foreigners who barely spoke English. I think I see how Romney lost Virginia.
I was in Washington for a Free Republic Patriots’ Rally back in 2002...my wife and I thought we were in the damn Middle East on the way back to our car via subway. Couldn’t get away from there fast enough.
I said “Hello” to an older lady who appeared to be Paki and she said “Shalom.” Isn’t that a Jewish word? Perhaps she thought I was a Jew?
I also bought a soldering iron from a nice Arabic fellow. $2.
Manassas is a bit far afield. When I think of ‘right outside DC’ I think of Arlington, Bethesda, maybe Alexandria...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.