Comment about: Flagstaff Real Estate Market Report
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| May 06, 2008 | | Thanks for your comments. You folks are an invaluable real estate resource. The 20 percent I claimed is, as you probably have guessed, largely a WAG and based mostly on what it appears our house in DC would be selling for here. We lived in Wheaton, MD, just a few blocks north of the Kensington border and two miles north of the DC border. Kensington, being the first non-multi-millionaire neighborhood north of Chevy Chase, is highly desirable, so we benefited from a great location and also a bit from that association. Between that, excellent staging on our part, a very savvy real estate agent, and a buyer who absolutely wanted our house no matter what, we got our asking price with no strings attached, which was about $20k more than we were expecting to settle for based on comps. We sold for $342k. That very same house here would *easily* list for $425k. Probably more, as the (1950s) construction was of notably higher quality than that of the two dozen (1970s-1980s) houses we've seen here. (This is not a knock of Flagstaff at all -- it's just the way it is everywhere: newer construction is, much of the time, flimsy and cheap compared to older construction. One could argue that the older stuff was unnecessarily sturdy, and builders got smarter over time.)
Anyway, that's what the 20% guess is based on. The real number may be 15%, or maybe 25%, but probably not: 20% seems the most likely. And, yes, surprising as it sounds, housing here in Flagstaff is uniformly substantially higher than in most areas in the DC metro area. If we had to buy our house in Maryland at the price we sold it for, we could, according to our mortgage lender, handily afford that. We can *not* afford that same house here, by at least $50k, and we could sell it here for around $80k more than we got for it in DC.
Amazing, isn't it? Nobody was more shocked than us. My DC coworkers are equally shocked, since before the housing balloon anybody who got transfered to Flagstaff (like I just did) made out like bandits. Things have certainly changed, and not to anybody's benefit as far as I can tell. It won't be "normal" again until housing prices fall to rejoin the normal inflation track that housing seems to have always followed before this obscene 2004-2006 balloon.
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