What Does the Coronavirus Impact on Our Housing Market Look Like?

Laura Schwartz is a licensed Realtor in VA, D.C. and MD with McEnearney Associates in McLean. Reach the office at 703-790-9090.

It’s hard to believe, but agents are still out showing homes for now.

It looks a lot different: gloves, sanitizer, Clorox wipes, or maybe a FaceTime showing, but people are still buying and selling homes in Vienna. My company, McEnearney Associates, has cancelled all public and broker open houses for the remainder of the month (and probably longer), however individual showings are still happening.

In the past 10 days, as of this writing, there were 70 new properties listed for sale in all of Vienna (including a bunch that were listed as “coming soon”). During those 10 days, 34 homes have gone under contract.

Believe it or not, I think any impact on the housing market will be short lived, and it’ll mostly look like lower or paused inventory, especially if our state is put on shut down. Talks of a recession don’t resemble the housing market crash of 2008, mostly because most of the people who own a home right now, were actually qualified to buy it instead of the bad loans given out during 2005-2006.

Unemployment will certainly have an impact on mortgage, but there’s also talks of suspending mortgage payments for a year on Fannie or Freddie mac loans, so I don’t expect there to be a sudden influx of distressed properties when this is done.

My educated guess is that in May or June when we get the “mostly clear” to resume activities, you’ll see all of the homes that would have been listed during March/April hit the market at once. Our low inventory issue may suddenly be temporarily solved.