Blink and They're Still There

"It's a little discouraging," she said. The DiPietros are moving to a larger house in Hamilton, to be completed in December, and have shaved $20,500 off their original $650,000 asking price after watching neighbors across the street reduce theirs and get a contract for that amount.

Archie Harders, a veteran real estate agent with McEnearney Associates, is resorting to sales tactics that would have been unnecessary a year ago. A key, he said, is to get homes viewed by as many buyers' agents as possible; to that end, he frequently updates listings in the database of homes that agent use.

"If you change a comma, or a period, your listing pops up as having been edited," he said. "It's another way of keeping it in front of their face."

A few blocks away from the DiPietros, Ken Wasserman sat one recent evening in his tidy, if bare, dining room, lamenting just how quickly the real estate landscape has changed. The house next door, he said, sold in a week last summer for $700,000.

Wasserman and his wife, both scientists with two children, put their house on the market in November for $716,000. They waited. And waited. Aware of developers offering tens of thousands of dollars in incentives on new homes in the area, the couple recently reduced the asking price to $680,000.

Any nibbles?

"Nothing. No offer," Wasserman said.

In an adjacent subdivision, also in the 20176 Zip code, Chris Downs, 25, a potential buyer, was flipping through townhouse listing fliers that he and his mother had collected from brochure boxes on signposts.

Downs, 25, a computer programmer, is considering buying his second townhouse and renting out the first, which he bought in 2004. Back then, Downs recalled, he made up his mind to buy within 15 minutes of setting foot in the home; he and the seller drew up the contract as a line of people waited outside to see the Leesburg townhouse.

But that was two years ago. This time around, Downs plans on negotiating hard.

"There are a lot of choices," he said. "When you look at these brochures, they're just slashing prices."

The same way that many houses were built in the outer suburbs during the boom years, thousands of condos were constructed in more urban areas. And those neighborhoods now are seeing an explosion of condos for sale, both new and used.

Alicia and Jeff Hennie, whose Columbia Heights condo hit the market Thursday with a $399,000 price tag, say they are prepared to wait it out, at least for a few months. Their one-bedroom unit is in the 20009 Zip code, which has the highest inventory of condos in the region. In their 64-unit building alone, two other similar condos are for sale, including an investor-owned, fully renovated unit. The couple is looking at a May 20 move-in date for a brand new condo downtown in the 20001 Zip code, another area with high condo inventory.

"We don't have to have it sold right away," said Alicia Hennie, 28, a manager at a nonprofit teen pregnancy prevention group. "But we don't want to carry two mortgages. . . . We'll see what happens."

Michael Soto, another condo seller in 20009, thought that he and his wife, Felicia, had priced their two-bedroom unit well when they put it on the market at $750,000 a month ago. A unit with the same layout sold for that much in November.

After four open houses, which drew about 100 visitors, it remains unsold. On Wednesday, the couple reduced their asking price to $725,000.

Sure, they're disappointed, Soto said. But he's sure they will make a good profit on the condo, because in the four years they have owned it, values have soared. And the less-frenzied market means they may be able to get a good deal as they look to move up to a single-family house.

"It may not be the peak price, but it's still going to be a good offer," he said of the condo. "It's all relative."