Charlottesville's Real Estate Blog. Buyer &/or Seller Representation, Real Estate News
Is it better to buy or rent in Charlottesville? It depends on what your goals are. Answer these questions first:
– How long are you planning to be in the Charlottesville area?
– Are you qualified?
– What are your life plans? (do you have kids? Plan to? Will you grow out of the space in under four years?)
Well that was fun. Saturday, I showed a few houses to buyer clients. And we each rode our bicycles; and I’m looking forward to doing it again. April was my first time showing a house on a bike and I’d been looking forward to doing it again. As this was my first time showing multiple houses with clients, I learned a few things.
If being closer to bike paths equates to higher property values, what better way to experience bike paths and on a bike?
Notes/lessons learned:
– Riding a bicycle is an infinitely better way to learn a neighborhood than riding in a car – taking in the smells (think Belmont BBQ), the sounds (trains in Charlottesville), topography (if you’re planning on commuting via bike).
Read about it at the HooK. Make sure you check out where the bypass may go.
Bear with me … I’m trying to make sense of the market.
Continuing my theme of looking at the Charlottesville real estate market data from a longer point of view, lest we track the housing market too closely …
It seems that we’re back (broadly) at 2004 – 2005 housing prices in Charlottesville.
Single family home median prices for Charlottesville MSA:
Attached home median prices for Charlottesville MSA:
I left off Greene and Louisa as they have negligible attached home inventories.
Zillow is still not accurate in Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Nelson, etc.
And that’s ok.
I look at too much data. I admit it. In this post, I’m posing just a question – when looking at the past ten years of real estate data** in the Charlottesville, Virginia area, what is a “normal” level of real estate transactions and is there a correlation between transactions and population growth? And how can my buyer and seller clients (and readers) apply this knowledge?
My hypothesis is that once we achieve a stable, consistent volume of real estate transactions – equilibrium if you will – we’ll be able to definitively say that we reached “bottom” or “stagnation” and start to consider such things as “appreciation of real estate values.”