203069 Resource 178975 173239 178982 1210087724823 1212847722780 Controlled about the "20%"

Thanks for your comments.&nbsp; You folks are an invaluable real estate resource.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We lived in Wheaton, MD, just a few blocks north of the Kensington border and two miles north of the DC border.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We sold for $342k.&nbsp; That very same house here would *easily* list for $425k.&nbsp; Probably more, as the (1950s) construction was of notably higher quality than that of the two dozen (1970s-1980s) houses we've seen here.&nbsp; (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.&nbsp; One could argue that the older stuff was unnecessarily sturdy, and builders got smarter over time.)&nbsp; <br /><br />Anyway, that's what the 20% guess is based on.&nbsp; The real number may be 15%, or maybe 25%, but probably not: 20% seems the most likely.&nbsp; And, yes, surprising as it sounds, housing here in Flagstaff is uniformly substantially higher than in most areas in the DC metro area.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.<br /><br />Amazing, isn't it?&nbsp; Nobody was more shocked than us.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Things have certainly changed, and not to anybody's benefit as far as I can tell.&nbsp; It won't be &quot;normal&quot; again until housing prices fall to rejoin the normal inflation track that housing seems to have always followed before this obscene 2004-2006 balloon.<br /><br /> 10 application/xml false Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 24.121.188.97 202872 false true false false true 178975 blog blogsite/BestFlagstaffHomes/moderated