The Northern Virginia housing market continued to stabilize in August, while foreclosures in the Maryland suburbs spiked from a year ago.
A total of 873 properties in Prince William County received a foreclosure notice in August, according to the online foreclosure-tracking Web site RealtyTrac. The county posted a 36 percent drop in foreclosures from August 2008 and a 16 percent drop from July. In Fairfax, the commonwealth’s most populous county, more than 1,200 foreclosures were filed last month, but those numbers marked a 5 percent drop from last year and a 34 percent drop from July.
“Northern Virginia remains a leading indicator” in the Washington area, said Anirban Basu, economist and chief executive officer of research firm Sage Policy Inc. Suburban Maryland is clearly still recovering in terms of home sales and the amount of time properties are sitting on the market, he said.
Still, foreclosure filings increased by 26 percent from August 2008 to 685 in Montgomery County, and spiked 76 percent to more than 1,600 in Prince George’s County.
“The August report demonstrates that there is still an ample supply of properties filling the foreclosure pipeline even while the outflow of bank-owned …properties onto the resale market is being more carefully regulated,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac.
Maryland and Prince George’s County have poured money into foreclosure prevention efforts, but Basu said it was too early to tell whether such programs are helping the market.
Peter Tatian, who studies national and local housing policy for the Urban Institute, said that such government help was still a lot lower than it needs to be.
“Some of these efforts are really just getting under way,” he said.
But Basu said he expected “more of the same” from the housing market — that sales volume would pick up and the market recovery would progressthrough November.
Then comes the big question, he said, when the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers ends in December.
“It’s just not clear — I’m not suggesting [the recovery won’t continue] — but a significant percentage of the sales are from first-time homebuyers,” he said.
“My guess is that the housing market recovery could very well pause,” he added.
