Home owners in the Washington area were among a select few across the country who saw the average value of their homes increase this fall, a new report says. Home prices in the region increased by 1.3 percent in October compared with October 2010, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released Tuesday. Detroit was the only other market in the nation’s top 20
to see a positive increase during the same time period.
The October uptick in the Washington area is on par with its annual performance this year, a rise largely due to the region’s stable economy supported by federal government spending, experts said.
| Best and worse | |
| October’s best and worst of the top 20 U.S.housing markets | |
| Best | |
| Detroit | +2.5% |
| D.C. | +1.3% |
| Dallas | -0.6% |
| Worst | |
| Atlanta | -11.7% |
| Las Vegas | -8.5% |
| Minneapolis | -8.4% |
| Source: S&P/Case-Shiller | |
“Washington has, for most of this year, consistently been one of the better-performing cities,” said David Blitzer, Standard & Poor’s chairman of the Index Committee. “The local economy is more resilient because Uncle Sam still employs a lot of [people in] D.C.”
The median sales price for homes in the D.C. metro area was a little more than $320,000 in October, according to a separate company, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc.
The positive gains come even as the federal government has been anything but predictable. With several federal government shutdown threats this year beginning in the spring, the debt ceiling crisis in the summer and the Super Committee’s showdown this fall over spending cuts, Washington has operated under its own cloud of confusion in 2011.
But experts said the threats so far have largely been empty.
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“The federal government has not yet started cutting back,” said John McIlwain, a housing expert with the Urban Land Institute. “But when it does, it hires contractors, so that balances it out [for the area].”
Nationally, home prices dipped in October by 3.4 percent compared to October 2010 prices. Experts attribute that decline to the uncertainty created by unemployment and foreclosures.
McIlwain said he expects the downward trend to continue for the national economy and that home prices will lose between 4 and 5 percent of their value this year.
Meanwhile, he predicts modest gains for the D.C. region as a whole.
