The State of the Arlington County Real Estate Market

Heading into December, the market will start to cool off, along with the temperatures. Normally, fewer properties will go on the market so fewer things will sell. Who really wants to move during the Holidays, right? So I suspect these numbers won’t change a whole lot as we round out 2010. Let’s look at the composition of properties for sale right now.

All numbers are ACTIVE (not pending) properties for sale and excludes the Jefferson Retirement Building (a condo community for people aged 55+), but includes condos, coops, single family homes, townhomes, duplexes, etc. For the sake of argument, I grouped townhomes and duplexes together.

Of the properties actively for sale, there’s a total of 628, and only 9% are distressed:

Now breaking down the inventory of short sales for sale (a total of 39):

You can see the majority of short sales, 69.2% are condos, mostly in South Arlington (22202,22204,22206). This explains why most of the South Arlington condos are still selling at a lower price and not rising in price as quickly as other parts of the county.

As for Bank Owned (foreclosures), there are 19 foreclosures for sale, again mostly condo:

Same thing here: mostly in South Arlington, mostly older condos.

Just a note…of the 628 properties for sale, 41 of them are new construction. This helps add to the total number of regular sales, as these are usually not distressed. Increased numbers of new properties also indicates a healthy market, as financing becomes more available and developers see opportunities to make money in real estate.