We’ve been in a transitional market since I started practicing real estate in 2001. No market is the same as the preceding year’s market. In the past four years, we have seen a massive increase in home prices in Charlottesville and Albemarle, interest rates go from the 3s to the 7s and now in the 6s.

And people kept buying homes. And they kept selling homes.

Have a question about anything below or the market? Ask me.

“Normal is now.” Or, said differently, “to be in a constant state of flux is normal.”

With that quick disclaimer – what are we seeing right now in the Charlottesville and Albemarle market?

Here’s a tl;dr:

• Homes are selling, a little bit slower in many cases. Days on market are creeping up. Note the slight uptick in Days on Market – is this a sign of a change, or within the margin of error? Or both?
• The first weekend remains critical. Price matters (as does preparation, staging, photos, marketing, et al)
• The market feels slow one day, and busy the next.
• I looked at 2019, 2023, and 2024 — 2019 was the last “normal” year, 2020 was well, 2020, and 2021 and 2022 may likely anomalies when we have more historical perspective.
• I can tell you what the market is doing right now, and projections to the future are beyond anyone’s scope, really.
  • How do you account for global catastrophes, immense US debt, US elections, unemployment, inflation? You acknowledge that they exist, and if you need to buy a home or sell to move to the next life stage, you have those conversations and decide with the best, most relevant information you can.
• That’s a long tl;dr.

Interesting and related things to read

• This interactive housing market map shows where sellers—or buyers—have the most power right now
• The hidden reason small homes aren’t more common: economies of scale
• Altos Research’s most recent market update

While I hope you find the charts and words interesting, in order for either to be useful for those making decisions about whether to buy, sell, stay, go, you need specific and relevant advice and guidance — and context

Below is part of an analysis I did for a client in Charlottesville. There’s more — there is always more context.

A few years after I started writing, I wrote:

One of the problems with the housing market is the constant tracking of the housing market. The market has never been an immediately-liquid investment, and it ought not be treated as such. How many of you read every line of your quarterly IRA or 401(k) statements? Hopefully not, because those are intended to be long-term investments. So is housing.

The market is a bit like the axiom – “a watched pot never boils.”  We won’t know how the market is doing today until we look back from a six- to nine-month removed perspective.  We can gain insight by looking at the numbers – interest rates, 10 year Treasury notes, pending sales, recent solds … but to get an accurate understanding, we have to look in the rear-view mirror.

Most of the analysis is cogent, articulate and informative, but. Do we really need to track the market on a daily, if not seemingly hourly basis? Many contracts were written three, four, six months ago. In reality, when analyzing the housing market, one is analyzing the past and attempting to project the future.

Housing should be, except in rare instances, a three to five year decision. We have lost sight of that over the past several years. The media has played a very large part of that, but so have the buyers and sellers. Let’s take a breath, step back a bit, read the apocalyptical and rosy projections and determine that reality is probably somewhere in between.