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Comment by actionablefiber | Hacker News Reader

That's not "the NoVA thing", really. It is a fact of life when you have 30-year fixed-rate mortgages.

Rates are up. Buyers don't want to buy at the same prices with the new rates. Sellers don't want to sell at the lower prices. What you have is a drop in liquidity.

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It is a NoVA thing. The '07/08/09 recession had minimal impact on the DC area housing market compared to the rest of the country. It peaked and fell like the rest but the fall wasn't as bad and the recovery was far quicker. The federal government and its related commercial contractors are the main ingredient in that.

I bought a house in DC in 2006 and my home's value never really fell, it just went flat for a year or two. Very different from the overheated markets like Las Vegas that lost 30%+ and took years to recover. There were a lot of foreclosures in my neighborhood in 07/08, but that didn't crash prices, it just boosted the volume of sales.

Not saying you're lying but DC home prices overall are down 14.7% YoY, and may have only just begun.

https://www.redfin.com/city/12839/DC/Washington-DC/housing-m...

Good. The pandemic price bubble could not last, and it outpaced wage growth quite a bit. As a property owner, I fully expect property values to slowly deflate to reality, however that's still going to be higher than they were pre-pandemic, and eventually slowly increasing again.

Meanwhile: Arlington, VA (where HQ2 is) says +1.1% YoY. Some wild volatility on those charts from the past year...

https://www.redfin.com/city/21282/VA/Arlington/housing-marke...

A drop in median sale price doesn't necessarily mean that the price for a specific house dropped that much. Some of that is probably just people holding off on buying or selling higher-end houses.

I was completely ignorant of the scale of the 08 recession partially due to being in my NoVA bubble. To be sure, part of that was definitely me: I didn't even think much of the fact that a friend was able to pick up a townhome that was foreclosed on for cheap. However it was definitely business as usual in the contracting world.

20 years of DoD led wars -- and another uptick because of Ukraine and supplying them -- means that there is a lot of $$$ for NoVA tech workers.

Like, the recession happened... but Iraq or Afghanistan didn't stop...

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