Ask Val: 2019 Local Real Estate Market Review

This regularly-scheduled sponsored Q&A column is written by Val Sotillo, Northern Virginia-based Realtor and Falls Church resident. Please submit your questions to her via email for response in future columns. Enjoy!

Question: How did the real estate markets near Tysons do in 2019?

Answer: Northern Virginia continues to dominate economic growth in the Washington region (see this excellent presentation from the Stephen Fuller Institute) and Tysons is and will continue to be an engine for Northern Virginia’s job growth.

Residential real estate prices have been mostly flat over the last 5-6 years, but buyer confidence has increased sharply over the last 12+ months with the announcement of Amazon HQ2 and rapid commercial investment in Tyson. This led to a strong year in the residential real estate markets surrounding Tysons.

For our annual review of the 2019 real estate market, we looked at the following Tysons-area markets:

• Falls Church: 22046 & 22043
• McLean: 22101
• Vienna: 22180 & 22181

With the exception of three outliers in Mclean ($12M, $20M and $43M sales) that skewed the findings and a few bad data entries that we removed, this represents all sales that closed in 2018 and 2019. We’ve prepared a bulleted list of key/interesting findings and then shared a summary table for those who want to review the data themselves.

Summary of Findings

• The average sold price across all three markets increased 5.4% in 2019 and buyer negotiation leverage dropped to an average of just 1.3% being negotiated off the original asking price
• Falls Church and Vienna led the growth in home prices, while McLean’s values remained mostly unchanged from 2018 (ignore the huge negative change in McLean condo prices, that’s a result of too few data points)
• The sub-market that performed the best was the Falls Church townhouse/duplex market, with a 6.6% YoY increase in average price
• The Vienna townhouse/duplex market provided buyers with the least room to negotiate, with the average purchase price equaling the seller’s original asking price
• While the 2019 condo market gained a modest 3.4% (not bad for condos), there seems to be significant upward pressure on prices coming into 2020 with a 40%+ drop in average days on market and buyer’s negotiating significantly less off the original asking price in 2019
• The number of new homes sold in 2019 increased nearly 30% from 152 to 195 and were pretty evenly distributed between all three markets

Additional Findings

Another interesting way of looking at market data is to compare how the upper, middle, and lower price ranges change year to year. The table below shows the low, high and average sold price within those ranges.

The prices within the upper, middle and lower ranges of the market stayed pretty consistent from 2018 to 2019. The biggest change was in Vienna’s lower 25%, which got nearly 6% more expensive in 2019 which could indicate its affordable housing is becoming not-so-affordable.

The average home in the upper 25% of McLean is nearly $2.4M, almost twice as much as the average home in the upper 25% of Falls Church and Vienna. This highlights the scale of McLean’s luxury market, unrivaled by any other market in Northern Virginia.

Note: remember that we removed three outlier sales in McLean of $12M, $20M and $43M so the findings were more accurate.

I hope you found this customized review of the 2019 Tysons-area housing market informative and interesting! If you are considering buying, selling or investing in the Northern Virginia market in 2020 (or beyond), don’t hesitate to email me at [email protected].

Val Sotillo is a licensed Realtor in Virginia, Washington D.C., and Maryland with Real Living At Home, 4040 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite #10C Arlington, VA 22203, 703-390-9460.