Great Falls Virginia Home Prices Drop and While New Real Estate Contracts Surge Upwards

Smaller Home Sizes for Great Falls Real Estate and Fewer Bathrooms

Jay Seville:  Hi, I’m Jay Seville, owner of Just New Listings.com realty had a branched off from Remax a year ago and brought my team with me to open my own company. And things have been going pretty well, 38 transactions last year. I wanted to give you a big update on the Great Falls Virginia real estate market. It’s been a few month since I looked at it this in depth for you and we’re trying to be better each week when the short video blog on the New Listings coming out et cetera. I think this home right here epitomizes what Great Falls Virginia is all about. Some of the most beautiful homes in the country. I have noticed that most of the homeowners while searching for a home generally use a broker who just makes things go in circles and by the end, these brokers waste a ton of the clients time and money. To cut short this part, many websites have started to showcase maps such as the Las Vegas Map on their website which is helping the clients narrow down their search using zip code rapidly thuds saving a lot of time and funds in this process. I think this is one such thing which is going to become a very common trend very soon and as this is undoubtedly helpful for the clients thus those who have it are going to get way much traffic and customers on their site.

But because it’s an upper end nitch market especially when you get passed $2 million, it’s different, often it’s upside down compared to the rest of the market in terms of it’s trends. So, it’s really important that you have somewhat cynical, skeptical, aggressive buyer agents on your side when you exam Great Falls Virginia real estate because there is just a lot more dollars at stake compared to dealing with land for sale Caversham. So, let’s look at the latest and greatest some pretty interesting info and it just confirms things that I told my clients in the past whom I sold property to at Great Falls. Number one, inventory is down a little bit, only about 10 percent from a year ago. Not that big of a deal – well just move on from there, what is a little more interesting is right here is new pending contracts are up versus a year ago in January we had 20 new contracts versus 12. And then just recently in February you have 20 versus 13.

So, generally we seem to have a very significant increase in the number of new contracts in Great Falls Virginia, that is the question, why? Well, as I blog before and said to clients before, Great Falls Virginia was really behind the curve in terms of sellers realizing how over priced the property was. But they have really sort of caught up finding with the market and are pricing their homes more realistically. And I think that’s having an impact. You get convenient real estate prices for Great Falls, you go back to April ’09, 1.59 million, you come down to here, April alignment and you get 1.38. So, prices have come down about 15 percent and I think now that makes it easier for new buyers to move forward buying homes. GTA Real Estate Pros help to find the buyers the right agent.

Another trend I see is that, you’ve heard about it nationally, you’ve heard sort of stories in the news, people are buying smaller homes now. Well, is that true locally because any of these national real estate stories you hear, they are almost worthless, they need nothing because real estate is inherently hyper local. Price trends where market trends, size of home turns everything is very hyper local from county to county, from zip code to zip code. So, national real estate stories are almost completely irrelevant. So, what we’re doing right here? And as you see here median square footage for Great Falls has gone from 6100 square feet down to 4900 square feet.

Now, that’s a pretty big decrease in median square footage for the home, that’s about 20 percent. So, that would explain also why the median price is going down. People are choosing to buy smaller homes now it appears. And that takes us to the next interesting status I found and that is the median baths per home Great Falls for these homes that are selling has gone from five down to four in the last year after having been at five for a couple of years. So, people are buying smaller homes, I think that’s an interesting trend. And that’s about it for today. I’m going to save the new listings that came on to market for a separate blog post.

But the big picture is prices are down, people are buying smaller homes and I think that is a reason why there is been an uptake in the new homes under in contracts. Number of homes under contract has gone up dramatically this year, almost, you know, at least 50 percent higher compared to the previous first two months in the year. So, a lot more homes are going under contract now and maybe that’s because people are buying less expensive homes and the price have – prices have come down. So, there you go, I hope that’s an interesting frame of reference for you. One thing for sure, each home you look at it’s case by case, as Spartanburg house buyers say. If you find a home you like that I showed to you, we’re going to look at the numbers on it, break it down and come up with the most aggressive price you can offer on this home and still get a counter offer back from the seller.

Now, the thing we are going to do is make a video email, making our presentation using graphs and showing why their home is over priced even if it’s not over priced. We’re going to make a very good presentation by a video email about why this home is over prices and why they need to come down at this price. And we will send that video – in most cases it ends up right in the front of the seller. So, it’s like us being able to negotiate with the seller directly and bypassing the listing agent in some ways. But I guess that’s a whole another blog post as well in terms of video, negotiating strategy which is on the cutting edge of real estate and I found it so helpful to helping, you know, knock some sense into the sellers and getting them to, to come to terms with my buyers. All right, talk to you later. Bye, bye.

Great Falls VA Homes for Sale — Prices and Square Footage Drop Significantly