This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
Just because there aren’t a lot of houses (104 active listings), currently on the market doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on in the housing market.
Lots of home owners are preparing their homes for the market and we will start to see a steady increase in listings over the next several weeks. If you’re on the fence about when to list your home for sale here are some things to consider:
- Buyer demand is high. In my Just Sold blog earlier this week I noted that 10% of the houses sold in the last 30 days sold higher than their list price and without requests for seller paid concessions.
- Low inventory means there is less competition. Fewer houses for sale will tend to favor the sellers. Not that you can throw anything out there and expect a contract, but well priced, well presented houses are going quickly.
- If you are a move up buyer now is the time to go — housing prices are predicted to increase 4.8% over the year. If you’re buying a more expensive house you’ll be making a larger down payment and paying higher interest for your mortgage.
Here are some of the new houses on the market this week:
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
I’ve been working with a buyer that wants new construction which has taken me into Reston’s newest neighborhoods. It’s been fascinating to explore these areas — seeing the new bump up against the old and start to get of sense of what could emerge.
Reston’s most recent round of residential construction outside of Reston Town Center was 2005/2006 when the Mercer Building and Carlton House were built. All of the construction since that time has been luxury apartments.
The Sekas Homes project, called Sunrise Square has a prime location within half a mile of the current and future Metro stops. The project includes a 10 unit condo building and 34 townhouses.
The condo’s which are nearly sold out are light and roomy with beautiful finishes, many of them have views of Reston National golf course. The condos also come with enormous temperature controlled storage rooms located in the basement of the building which makes them great for empty nesters that haven’t quite purged off all of their old life possessions; or anyone with hobbies and gear!
The garage townhouses come with a range of options but the baseline models include:
- Outdoor living on two levels with a main level deck and rooftop terrace overlooking Reston
- 9′ ceilings throughout
- 3-4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths
- Gourmet kitchen with high-end appliances
- Access to all of Reston’s amenities
For those worried about the vertical nature of townhouse living there is a floorplan that includes an optional elevator. Other options include outdoor fireplace for the rooftop terrace.
Sekas Homes is an award winning custom home builder with a reputation for beautiful high quality projects. They’re known for their green building methods and have won awards from the city of Vienna and Fairfax County.
Residents of this new neighborhood are full dues paying members of the Reston Association and have access to all of Reston’s amenities.
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
The past 30 days have seen 72 properties go to settlement. That’s two thirds of the total inventory of houses available for sale.
The housing inventory is so low that more buyers are worried that they won’t find a house to purchase; while it’s not uncommon to see a dip in housing inventory at this time of year numbers, this low are pretty extreme.
Digging into the recent sales I see that 10% of these properties sold above list price with an average days on market of just 4 days — so sold in less than a week for more than list price; sounds like a win/win!
Here are a few of the recent sales.
2401 Ansdel Court
4 BR/2.5 BA
List Price:Â $399,000
Sold Price:Â $425,000
11442 Church Hill Road
2 BR/2 BA
List Price $324,900
Sold Price $330,000
11756 Great Owl Circle
4 BR/4.5 BA
List Price $565,000
Sold Price $570,000
11184 Glade Drive
3 BR/2.5 BA
List Price $575,000
Sold Price $593,000
1945 Roland Park Drive
4 BR/4.5 BA
List Price: $981,375
Sold Price: $981,375
This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
At the risk of repeating myself, housing inventory is crazy low!
Just 104 active listings, there are 4 in a “Coming Soon” status but for 3 zip codes this is seriously low inventory.
83 homes settled in the past 30 days, which says that demand for houses is still strong especially given the holidays.
Here are a few of the new listings this week:
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
It’s not just about the houses.
One of the biggest surprises of being in real estate was realizing how little the work turns out to be about houses and how much more it is about walking with people as they navigate different life transitions.
I love the HGTV real estate shows where the real estate agent shows a buyer 3 homes and voila, they pick a house, write a contract, move in and the next time you see them they’re at a house warming party — all this in 30 minutes. As is often the case with realty TV, it’s not very real.
In real life people are dealing with all kinds of events that are driving them from one place to another place.
Some are happy, some are sad, some are speculative but it is mostly about life changes, marriage, births, deaths, retiring, divorcing, new jobs and lost jobs. Sometimes it’s about more than one thing, a new marriage and a new job.
Change is almost always hard for people; we are rarely at our best when we’re moving through transitions. Real estate agents spend a lot of time with people who aren’t at their best, but they might be more real than if you had met them at a cocktail party.
It’s one of the things I like about my job, the connections that are made if only for a short while.
Here are the Reston numbers. There are currently 104 fully active properties on the market in Reston. We have 55 pending properties which leaves us with a little less than two months inventory. Obviously in our market a prolonged government shut down will be damaging to our housing market but hopefully we’ll find a way past that impasse soon!
Updated at 2:35 p.m. — Includes updated numbers for the food pantry.
The holidays may be over, but one business at Lake Anne Plaza is continuing the season of giving and holiday spirit into 2019.
The Lake Anne Brew House (11424 Washington Plaza W.) hosted an ugly sweater fundraising party yesterday (Jan. 6) to benefit the food pantry at South Lakes High School.
Several realtors, including Rob Cox, Mary Miceli, Carol Welsh and Ben and Kristi Guidry from Long & Foster Real Estate, helped host the party, according to a Lake Anne Plaza Facebook post.
The Lake Anne Brew House credited Long & Foster in Reston with the idea for the party and sponsorship of the pizza.
The event collected non-perishable food items and personal products — along with a nearly $500 donation — for the school’s food pantry, where nearly 730 students can “shop” for food and toiletries.
The food pantry is designed to help close the hunger and nutrition gap for the 30 percent of South Lakes High School students who are on the free and reduced lunch program, according to the school. The food pantry distributes more than 175 bags of groceries and toiletries to more than 95 families each week.
Roberta Gosling, one of the founders of the pantry, told Reston Now that students from Langston Hughes Middle School, Terraset Elementary School and other South Lakes High school pyramid schools are coming to the pantry.
Since opening in March 2017, the food pantry has given out more than 8,000 bags of food, she said.
Photo via Lake Anne Plaza/FacebookÂ
This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
In my last post about the year in real estate I talked about how the low housing inventory didn’t seem to be driving buyer panic or seller over-confidence.
The market behavior is balanced but very active. As one would expect in this post-holiday week there are very few new listings and only 106 active properties on the market.
What I think is interesting is that 55 properties went into Pending status over the past 30 days and more than half of those did so in the last two weeks!
There are buyers out there looking, so if you’re thinking of selling it might be a good time to clean out the closets and call your agent.
Here are a few of the new listing this week:
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
Reston had a really strong 2018 in real estate. The total volume of transactions will finish at about 1,300 and the average home price was 474,000 a 5% increase over last year.
Inventory of homes for sale has been very low but hasn’t caused any type of panic in the buyers, nor has it embolden the seller to push their list prices up. Days on market are now averaging 40, and about 45% of 2018 transactions included a seller contribution to the buyers closing costs.
Reston continues to be an appealing housing market for many buyers. The metro, the Dulles Tech corridor combined with diverse housing options and great amenities puts Reston on the top of a lot of buyer’s lists.
Here are the numbers for the past 10 years.
This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
As we roll into the holiday week there are almost no “new” listings. Most folks will wait until the holidays are past before listing their homes for sale. I thought we’d take a quick look at some of the older listings on the market.
When a seller engages an agent to sell their property what they are hiring is (hopefully) expertise in finding the sweet spot of price vs. property condition. Condition of a property is one of the largest drivers of property value, I would say second only to location.
It’s the agent’s job to analyze sales and condition and to provide a comparison of those sold properties against the seller’s property. It’s the seller’s job to pick the price, hopefully based on the data provided.
It can be hard for sellers and buyers to accept that the market is its own thing — we can’t force it to do our bidding. The buyer who comes in with a super low offer thinking they can force a sellers hand will be just as disappointed as the seller who overprices their property with the “I’m not in a hurry, I’ll wait to get my price” strategy. Rarely is either successful.
Here are a few great properties that have been hanging around a while along with their current list price:
- Condo at 120oo Block of New Dominion Parkway, 1 BR/1 BA, 375 Days on Market — $414,000
- Single-Family Home at 12000 Block of Walnut Branch Road, 5 BR/ 4.5 BA, 353 Days on Market —Â $1,245,000
- Condo at 1800 Block of Fountain Drive, 2 BR/2 BA, 238 Days on Market —Â $461,000
For the past year I’ve been saying that the market is very price sensitive. What I mean is that properties that are within 10-20k of their best price are hanging on the market — buyers are not aggressively pursuing these “slightly” overpriced properties, they’re letting them sit.
This of course is bad for sellers because the longer they sit the more it costs them (both in carrying costs and in lost opportunities, etc.) what they might have done with the cash had they gotten the house sold.
A seller’s best strategy is always to be the best priced and best presented home in their particular market — stand out by being a market of one, rather than one of many.
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
I often hear debates about the value of amenities in communities. For those of us that are lucky enough to call Reston home we have an absolute treasure trove of events and activities to choose from to fill our leisure time.
Last Sunday I attended “From Here to There” featuring opera singer Elizabeth Bishop performed at the CenterStage at the Reston Community Center Hunters Woods. It was a lovely evening of storytelling in song and all the more amazing to think that it was available to us all, right in our own backyards for a mere $15!
The CenterStage is about half way through its season but there still lots of great shows to see.
The weekend of January 19-21 is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. This year features a concert by local artist Crys Mathews. If you haven’t seen her I urge you to get tickets, she’s a remarkable singer songwriter, cut from the cloth of the justice and protest writers of the past but current and relevant in every way imaginable.
The CenterStage season offers a wide range of shows from music to dance to discussions with notable public figures like CBS News commentator and comedian Nancy Giles. If you like jazz you’ll want to take note of Jazzmeia Horn on March 30. She’s amazing!
There really is something for everyone.
This may not seem like it has much to do with real estate but the RCC is a huge value-add to the community — I would argue that its presence in the community, and all the ways it strives to enrich daily life for us all, adds to the desirability of Reston.
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
With so few houses on the market, just 141 as of this post, why isn’t it more of a seller’s market? Interest rates are still crazy low, the job market is stable. All indicators seem to point to a market that favors the sellers, and yet it is not. The market is very balanced.
Today’s buyers are informed, methodical and not in a rush. The amount of time buyers spend researching homes online? Countless. Number of homes buyers saw online before engaging a real estate agent? Hundreds. They’ve done their research and are ready.
The median number of weeks buyers spent viewing homes in person was 10 weeks. Once they actually begin looking at homes, they are ready to take action when the right property pops up.
Sellers need to prepare for a little more time on the market with the average days on market sitting at 40. If you really get your place ready to sell and hit the market at the right price you’ll reduce that number considerably.
Here are a few of the recent sales:
11698 Sunrise Square Place
4 BR/4.5 BA
List Price: $963,520
Sold Price: $963,520
1311 Quail Ridge Drive
5 BR/3.5 BA
List Price: $785,000
Sold Price: $775,000
11555 Underoak Court
3 BR/2/2 BA
List Price: $359,000
Sold Price: $353,000
2022 Chadds Ford Drive
3 BR/3.5 BA
List Price: $549,980
Sold Price: $549,980
12000 Market Street #161
1 BR/1 BA
List Price: $315,000
Sold Price: $315,000
This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
Just 14 new properties were listed in Reston this past week. Inventory is painfully low at just 142 active listings. That represents a housing inventory of less than two months.
It’s not uncommon for additions to inventory to slow at this time of year but hopefully things will loosen up as we move into the New Year.
Here are few of the new homes for sale in Reston.
- 1626 Apricot Ct *, 3 BR/2.5 BA — $564,900
- 1959 Sagewood Ln, 2 BR/2 BA — $158,500
- 2158 Golf Course, 3 BR/4 BA — $475,000
- 1632 Wainwright Dr, 4 BR/3 BA — $459,900
- 12000 Taliesin PL #23 *, 2 BR/2 BA — $330,000
*These properties have advertised open houses
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
I’ve been checking out the new construction that’s popping up along Sunset Hills Road and Sunrise Valley Drive. As a long time Restonian it’s a little unnerving to see the crush of development taking place in areas that were previously office parks and light industry enclaves.
The new Pulte Homes project on Michael Faraday felt especially jarring to me. As I stood in a beautifully finished living room I experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance; every previous trip I’d ever made on that end of Sunset Hills Road has been related to dental appointments, trips to the Post Office or picking up to-go meals from China Star.
Now I was looking at an evolving skyline, two blocks away was the striking face of 1900 Reston Station — the Helmut Jahn building; beyond that the cranes are visible for the other mixed use projects that are coming to Sunset Hills.
The Pulte Homes project is the first of many to come along Sunset Hills Road that will create an entirely new Reston neighborhood, one with a much more urban feel to it than any other we’ve seen before.
The Pulte project is called Lofts at Reston Station. It is comprised of 12 two level row house styled condos and 32 one level condos in an elevator building. The one level condos offer 7 floor plans all two bedroom, 2 full bath units ranging from 1,274 sq. ft. to 1,668 sq. ft. The baseline features include 9 ft. ceilings, hardwood floors, granite counters in kitchens and baths and a full range of energy efficient and smart home technologies.
It will be interesting to watch this area develop over the next several years, transforming into a walkable, transit focused and very dense neighborhood. It looks like this neighborhood is on a path to develop into something that will have a core to anchor it — the Metro Plaza.
It will be interesting to watch that plaza evolve as the community settles in around it as residents rather than commuters. It’s not unlike Reston’s early developments, creating the gathering places, adding the residence and then letting it bubble into a neighborhood.
This is a sponsored post by Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate.
Just 12 new properties were listed in Reston this past week. Inventory is painfully low at just 147 active listings. That represents a housing inventory of less than two months.
What is interesting is that houses are sitting on the market longer than one would expect given the very low inventory. The message for sellers — prepare your home for sale and price it competitively!
Here are few of the new homes for sale in Reston:
This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.
It’s been an interesting fall market in Reston. Our housing inventory has been very constrained with fewer than 200 houses on the market — we’re especially tight right now with just 148 active listings on the market.
Even with the constrained inventory property is not selling so fast that you could call it a “Seller’s Market.” The average days on market is a whopping 80 days!
The buyers are out there but they are being very particular and, they aren’t over-paying. Seller’s need to put the time into getting their homes ready for the market and they need to price them competitively.
Here are a few of the recent sales:
11081 Pelham Manor Place
5 BR/3.5 BA
List Price: $1,025,000
Sold Price: $998,000
11005 Burywood Lane
4 BR/3.5 BA
List Price: $819,000
Sold Price: $800,000
1609 Greenbriar Court
4 BR/3 BA
List Price: $625,000
Sold Price: $597,000
11763 North Shore Drive
5BR/3.5 BA
List Price: $579,900
Sold Price: $564,000
11783 Indian Ridge
3 BR/2.5 BA
List Price: $510,000
Sold Price: $514,500
