As we all have pretty much witnessed, real estate has been on a crazy roller coaster over the past 10 years. Prices spiked up, and now they’re dropping. The county I live in, Fairfax County in Northern VA, has been somewhat “recession-proof”, so we haven’t seen as much of a drop as other parts of the country. There is still a drastic difference in pricing over the past 10 years, and some clues as to what to expect in the next few years. Lets take a look at the raw data:

Now lets take a look at the important charts that we take away from the data:

We can see here that from 1999-2006, the housing market skyrocketed up, going from about $195,000 to about $480,000 for the median selling price. That’s almost a 250% gain in prices in just 8 years! Then over the past 2 years, especially the last one, we see it start to come down from $480,000 to around $400,000…about 17%. The decline is happening pretty rapidly, so it doesn’t look like it would just start to flatten out anytime soon. The interesting thing to note in the first chart is the amount of units actually sold. From 1999-2004 there was a slight rise in the units sold (keep in mind this is just the April of each year), but a large decline after that through today. It took a couple years for the prices to start following the lower demand in units.

The even more interesting thing is in the 2nd chart, where it shows how many houses are actively listed for sale. Look at what happened from the middle of 2005 through today. The amount of active listings on MRIS skyrocketed up from about 2,000 units to over 8,000…over 4 times as many listings. With way more listings on the market, and way less demand, I can only predict that the market will continue to rapidly drive prices down much further. Although prices have come down a bit, I still feel like they are drastically inflated. Let’s take a look at the townhouse I live in now:

Using valuation data from Zillow, we can see that the house was purchased for $314,000 in 2003. The price peaked at $543,000 in just 2 years…a 73% gain! Just 2.5 years later, it has dropped down to about $400,000…still giving it an overall gain of about 27% in 5 years. I think it was already overpriced by 2003, but it was newly built, so I can’t look back any further. I’ll bet if the house was built and sold in 1999 or 2000, it would have been under $200,000.

It’s a crazy crazy market right now. Since I’m not a homeowner (I’m renting the above exemplified house), I hope that the prices continue to get driven down so that they are actually affordable to the majority of people. On a $100,000 salary, you realistically can only afford a mortgage for a $300,000-$350,000 house based on the figures I’ve seen. That means you can’t even buy the basic run of the mill townhouse that I live in. That’s pretty pitiful.

How is your local market?

For 2008, Washingtonian Magazine rated Citronelle the best restaurant in Washington DC. There are a lot of places to eat in a city as big as our capitol, so you can imagine what an honor it would be to get this rating. We had to go and see what all the hype was about, so a few of us headed into Georgetown for a night of French fine dining. One of the really cool things about Citronelle is that some of the food is made to look like one food, but made with another. I’ll get more into that when I go over what we go to show you what I mean.

We were originally going to get the promenade gourmande, which is a preset menu. We decided against it because if you do promenade gourmande, everybody on the table has to do it…and we wanted to have more of a selection. Here’s a selection of some of the stuff that we got throughout the night:

We all started off with a pre-appetizer (amuse bouche) to get the pallet ready. From left to right we have quayle egg, salmon, and a chicken lollipop:

For my appetizer I had the lobster “begula” pasta. This is one of the foods that are meant to look like something else. It’s mean to look like caviar, but in reality it’s actually pasta balls covered with ink squid, with lobster underneath. This was to die for.

Stephanie got the escargot, which had a great presentation:

Andrew’s appetizer was another one of those look-a-like foods. He had the “egg symphony”, which was four different plates meant to look like a variety of eggs, but were something else. For example on the bottom left it was actually slices of mozzerela with cheddar on top of it:

For my entree I had the lamb:

CD and Marcel had the chateaubriand, the presentation was absolutely amazing:

For dessert I had the chocolate soufflet:

Andrew had the breakfast sampler dessert…another look-a-like food:

Rather than explain everything, here’s a little video explaining:

Here’s a shot of all of us afterwards, I’m the guy in the font between the two girls:

Citronelle isn’t for the faint of hard. Dinner for the 6 of us including 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne was about $1,600. It was quite an experience in fine french cuisine. There was an obvious amount of effort spent in the presentation, and it showed. If you are looking for a very nice dinner, you can’t go wrong with Citronelle.

Citronelle
3000 M St. NW
Washington, DC
Georgetown
T: (202)625-2150
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Kid Friendly: No
Cuisines: French, Modern
Price Range: Very Expensive