Looking forward, looking back
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Smallest house - There were tinier condos and apartments, but at 638 finished square feet, this home on Palatine Avenue was the smallest detached house sold this year.CAAR MLS
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Biggest house and biggest price reduction - At the opposite end of the spectrum, Patricia Kluge's former home, Albemarle House, clocks in at 18,000 finished sq. ft. (with another 5,000+ unfinished). It sold for $6,700,000, well below its most recent asking price of $16,000,000 and a mere fraction of its original asking price of XXX.CAAR MLS
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Highest sale - Tra Vigne, a 17,000 square-foot, 138-acre estate in Free Union, topped the chart with a sales price of $9,650,000.CAAR MLS
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Lowest sale - The sale of this foreclosure was affected by a number of factors-- boundary problems and title issues among them-- resulting in a sales price of $17,700, well below the final asking price of $91,900.CAAR MLS
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Most acreage - This formerly Kluge-owned property in southern Albemarle, Viewmont Farm, was traded away this year by Dr. Charles Hurt. The 875-acre farm was subject to both open space easements and protective covenants.CAAR MLS
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Longest listing - The Ivy-area house at 3515 Rocks Mill Lane spent a whopping 1387 days on the market before trading in a short sale for $808,000.CAAR MLS
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Quirkiest listing - Besides some severely angled walls, this 1BR, 1bath A-frame cottage featured a staircase leading to a sleeping loft with no closet and a bathroom doubling as a laundry room.CAAR MLS
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Biggest retail sale - Although the former Ponderosa building on Pantops wasn't the commercial sale with the largest price, it was the one with the most finished square footage: 7,333.CAAR MLS
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Emptiest mega-office - Not a sale, not even a lease, but an enormous amount of space-- 77,419 available for rent in the UVA Research Park.CAAR MLS
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Highest profile - The Landmark hotel shell gets sold to an Atlanta developer in August for $6.25 million.hawes spencer
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Biggest condo deal - Three floors of Waterhouse, the new mixed-use structure cantilevered over the old Thomas Tire building, traded hands in July for $9.9 million.hawes spencer
Our local housing market saw a bit of a rebound in 2012, as reported by both Nest Realty and CAAR (the Charlottesville-Albemarle Association of Realtors), and now that the year is drawing to a close, a number of us are wondering what might be in store for 2013. Though making predictions can be a risky business (just look how things turned out for the Mayans), the prospect of missing the mark doesn’t deter some folks from whipping out their crystal balls.
This time last year, TransUnion, a credit reporting agency, predicted we’d see a decrease in the number of delinquent mortgages during 2012, and that prediction held true. Granted, they had a fifty-fifty shot at being right, but movement in the right direction, and incremental improvement, is better than a decline. For 2013, they’re forecasting another drop in delinquencies, although this projection is a good bit more modest than last year’s.
Though their formal 2013 forecast won’t be presented until early January, the National Association of Realtors released a report in June with early projections and some all-around useful information that helps shed some light on future forecasts.
Housing starts, for example, which measure the number of homes under construction, new home sales, and existing home sales are all used as indications of the direction the market will take. According the NAR report, all three indices have been on the rise, which bodes well for the coming year. Housing start rates hit a four-year high in 2012 and are expected to increase 75 percent over the next two years, depending on lending requirements. New homes sales and existing homes sales are also projected to continue their upward movement.
Forbes.com attributes the uptick in housing starts in part to underbuilding– constructing fewer new homes than what is needed to meet demand. A couple of factors that have reduced demand are a decrease in population growth and the fact that bleak employment prospects have forced many adult children to move back in with their parents. Barring a significant improvement in the job market that would enable those adult kids to move out and put a dent in the surplus housing inventory, Forbes is forecasting moderation across the board– a gentle rise in home prices and a similar improvement overall with many homeowners remaining underwater (owing more than their home is currently worth).
Goldman Sachs agrees that improvement in the labor market is a key factor in increasing “household formation” (that’s the part where the adult kids move out of their parents’ basements and get houses of their own). Overall, Goldman, too, tows the middle line in its projections, calling for a 3-4 percent increase in home prices, a slight upsurge that should have a beneficial effect on both the economy and credit availability. Their expert is quick to caution that the effects will vary from market to market, however.
And speaking of individual market variance, how about the market that most of us care about, the greater Charlottesville-Albemarle area market? Well, fourth quarter reports haven’t been released yet, but the market steadily increased its performance throughout 2012, leading to an overall optimistic tone in the CAAR third-quarter report. While the Nest Realty’s November Market Update doesn’t make a prediction for 2013, it echoes the optimism found in the CAAR report, citing a 15 percent increase in sales year-over-year and pointing out that Charlottesville city inventory is lower now than it has been since 2005.
Looking forward is fun, but it can also be fun to take a look back. Here’s a walk back through a number of listings and sales in our area that were interesting for a variety of reasons.