Developer Mid-City Urban, which staged one of the area’s first new condo auctions in years last weekend, sold all 30 of its available Alexandria units for an average of 7.5 to 11.5 percent below the asking price, the auction company said.
Two-bedroom condos in the Parkside at Alexandria community that were priced at $339,000 sold for an average of $300,000, according to Jon Gollinger, CEO of Accelerated Marketing Partners East Coast, which facilitated the auction for Mid-City Urban.
The three-bedroom condos, valued at $379,000, sold for an average of $350,000, he said. The auction drew 150 bidders, and the units sold in less than an hour.
Mid-City held the auction to try to purge the remaining unsold units in its 378-unit western Alexandria development.
The units were renovated in 2005 and converted from rental units to condos.
“We were hoping to … overcome hesitancy in the marketplace, where buyers have been kind of slow to purchase because they’ve been worried about where the real estate market is going,” said Vicki Davis, president of Mid-City Urban, based in Silver Spring. “We’re thrilled with the results — the auction created exactly the momentum and response that we wanted.”
The Examiner reported earlier this month that while new condo sales have dropped by half this year, sale prices have remained steady, falling only 0.3 percent regionwide, according to real estate research firm Delta Associates.
“It’s hard to know in an auction who was buying — it’s more likely they were investors than people like you or me,” said Stephen Fuller, head of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. “I think the pricing on this and the success of the sale doesn’t say as much about the market as it does about the amount of money available for investments.”
Fuller said confidence in the Washington economy, where job growth is robust, propels investors who are willing to wait out the housing downturn to ferret out deals.
“You wouldn’t be doing this in Detroit and you wouldn’t be doing this in Atlanta, where the markets are crippled,” Fuller said. “But prices are relatively firm in the D.C. market.”
