Photo Illustration: Adam Ewing; Model: Emma D. for Modelogic/Wilhelmina; Hair and makeup: Natty Jackson; Sunglasses: Dita Arise, $587, courtesy Carytown Optical Shoppe
If you’re looking for a home in the Fan or Westhampton neighborhoods, good luck, because you’ll need it, along with persistence or a stack of cash when you make your offer. Maybe all three.
This is the strongest seller’s market — particularly in the city’s West End, Museum District and The Fan — since the 2008 recession, local Realtors say. “It’s just nuts,” says John Martin, recently a Realtor with Long & Foster’s Strawberry Street office. “You can’t even get an appointment on the first day.” Chesterfield and Henrico counties also have seen a significant uptick in sales, including Short Pump’s new GreenGate, where you can swap your sunglasses for a virtual-reality headset to walk through a model home.
To win a bid, some buyers are waiving inspections, offering thousands over the asking price and writing emotion-filled letters to sellers. Many successful buyers put down cash or say they’ll pay for repairs that sellers ordinarily are responsible for.
Statistics reflect the stories, with sales of single-family homes during the first quarter of 2017 up 13.4 percent and pending contracts up 9.3 percent compared with the first quarter of 2016 in the region’s 14 jurisdictions. Laura Lafayette, CEO of the Richmond Association of Realtors, reports that condo sales have increased even more dramatically since last year, with 28.2 percent more sales.
For sellers, this is great. “The seller who gets their house in good shape before they put it on the market, it’s going to move. The day of the deal is over,” Lafayette says.
Demand Outstripping Supply
People are starting to put their homes on the market again for the first time since the housing bubble burst in 2008. But demand is greater than supply, particularly in areas 10 and 20 of the city, and just over the city line in Henrico County’s Tuckahoe and River Road neighborhoods. Multiple offers — and difficult decisions for buyers — are par for the course.
To put the current housing market in Central Virginia into perspective, six months’ worth of inventory is considered a normal market that favors neither buyer nor seller, Jim Napier of Napier ERA, explains. On average, the Richmond region has a little more than four months of inventory based on home sales from the first quarter of 2017. It’s much tighter in the Fan and the Museum District, with 2.2 months of inventory. In Wyndham, northern Chesterfield and Henrico’s near West End, there’s about three months of inventory.
Suburban homes between $385,000 and $400,000 are moving quickly, according to John Finn Jr.,a broker with United Real Estate and a former RAR president. (Photo by Jay Paul)
John Finn Jr., who has been in the real estate game since 1975, notes that a lot of the hotter properties have price in common, not just neighborhoods. For first-time buyers looking for a home in the $155,000 to $250,000 range, “there is very little inventory,” says Finn, who’s with United Real Estate. Properties in Brookland Park, Ginter Park and Carver are selling briskly, and so are suburban homes in the $385,000 to $400,000 range, typical for second-time buyers who are moving to neighborhoods with high-ranked schools, he says.
Ed Knight, president of Richmond real estate appraisal firm Knight, Dorin & Rountrey, notes that the job market here is growing in some sectors, especially medical and service-oriented work, and at distribution centers, such as Amazon. As businesses continue to thrive, combined with the stable presence of government and VCU in Richmond, he expects the real estate market to remain sturdy, too.
“It’s a lot of pent-up demand over the years,” says Scott Shaheen, broker and co-owner of Shaheen, Ruth, Martin & Fonville Real Estate. Many people were recovering from the recession, he says, and didn’t want to risk purchasing a new home in case the stock market took another dip. And plenty of people had other reasons to stay put: schools, for instance.
But with a healthier economy and interest rates only slightly above their historic lows, more people are now on the move.
No Signs of Slowing Down
“Every listing I’ve had since January in Area 20 has had multiple offers,” says Margaret Wade, a Realtor at Long & Foster’s Libbie and Grove office. “[That area] always had a lack of inventory. Homes ranging from $500,000 to $1.75 million have had multiple offers or lots of interest.”
In Henrico, homes in Westham and Wyndham sell quickly and sometimes garner multiple bids, and in Chesterfield, houses in Hallsley and Salisbury stay on the market only a day or two, Shaheen says.
As for today’s buyers, Shaheen says, “we’re seeing a lot of millennials putting their big foot forward and buying their homes. They’re having children and moving up. If you’re looking to buy your first home, align yourself with an experienced real estate agent and get yourself pre-approved by a credit agency before even looking at homes.”
Shaheen predicts that the market will remain strong for the next 18 months, and Lafayette says the same, with typical dips in summer and winter. “I haven’t seen any indication that it’s going to slow down,” she says.
