I’ve been looking at some houses from time to time, and I’ve really seen a dramatic change in what you can get for the price in this area. Back in July I looked at a house in Sterling that was a foreclosure priced at $365,000. I wasn’t all impressed with the house. One of my friends owns a few Champion real estate offices in this area, and sent me a listing for a house in South Riding, VA that seemed like a great deal. It was listed as a short sale, not exactly a foreclosure just yet, but getting there. We had found that houses that were much smaller in the area were going for more than this house was listed for. I decided to go take a look. The house was listed for $350,000, but although never 100% accurate, a Zillow.com search found it valued well over $400,000. Here’s some pictures I took:

It’s a pretty wide 2-car garage townhouse with I believe 2,600 sq/ft of living space. It was built in 2001, so it’s fairly new.

The colors are horrendous, but you can see the living and dining room when you walk in. The little walkway that I’m standing on has wood flooring. There is an ample amount of space here, and I like the column separating the dining room, as well as the step up to that level. The trimming everywhere also looks nice. There is also a bathroom on the right which you cannot see.

The kitchen is pretty nice, and was quite big. The countertops are granite, although looked a little cheap I guess due to unbeveled edges. Also, you can see the columns look a little cheesy, and needed to be repainted or something. While you can’t see it in the first picture, to the right there is a space for a some sort of deak, as well as a double door out to the deck. There is room here for another table or something, with a fireplace (kinda akward place to put one).

Here we can see the deck, pretty nice size (looks a lot bigger in person).

I was pretty impressed with the downstairs area, but upstairs was a bit weaker. Here we can see the master bedroom. It looks bigger in person, but it’s smaller then the one in the house I live in now, which is a smaller townhouse. It had two walk-in closets which was nice.

The master bathroom seemed a bit cheap to me. The master bathroom in the house I live in now blows this one away. The cabinets were a bit damaged, and probably needed replacing. The toilet had its own separate room, which was nice.

There is a second bathroom upstairs for the other two bedrooms, pretty nice. There is also a washer and dryer upstairs.

These are the other two bedrooms. Both are slightly bigger looking in person, and I would say decent sized.

Downstairs is the basement, it’s about twice the size as you can actually see. It’s big, and would be a perfect office setup with maybe a pool table or something along those lines.

The backyard is also a little bigger than it looks in the pictures. There is a nice shed on it that you can’t see in the picture. It’s perfectly sized for what I would want. Nothing too hard to manage.

You can’t really tell in the picture, but the garage is really more like a 2.5 car garage. On the left there is more space that would probably allow me to fit a motorcycle sideways in it. That’s always a nice thing for me. You can see some insulation on the right part of the garage door. It looked like they may have had some bugs get in somewhere, so the garage door would probably need to be replaced.

South Riding is a great area, it’s all a planned community. There is a lot of new stuff, schools in good locations, shopping centers right there, etc. It’s typically what I’d be looking for.

Overall I think the house would have been a great buy and a solid investment. We were planning to potentially make an even lower lowball offer, but the house ended up going under contract 2 days later.

What does $350,000 get around you nowadays?