Keeping Tabs on the Joneses

On Onion Patch Drive in Burke, neighbors are keeping an eye on each other.

It's not just because they're neighborly. It's also because, at a time when more and more for-sale signs are appearing on lawns around the region, what one family does to sell its house can have a big impact on the finances of the rest.

Seema Owais stood at her front door on a recent afternoon, bouncing her toddler daughter on her hip, looking out onto the winding, tree-lined street. Owais, 35, a time-pressed financial adviser, homemaker and mother of three, wants to move closer to her parents. She and her husband put their detached Colonial on the market several months ago for $619,000, about $100,000 less than others in the neighborhood got when they sold their houses last year.

And now she worries that some of her neighbors -- retirees and people transferring out of the area, especially -- are depressing real estate values even more.

"They get scared and start reducing and reducing," she said. "For us, it's disheartening, but you can't do anything about it."

Four houses up Onion Patch Drive, Stephen Myers, 56, is planning his retirement and wants to sell. He and his wife have owned their house for almost two decades and want to move to a senior community in Winchester.

He dropped the asking price for his house from $717,900 to $649,000 after the house across the street sold in June for $602,000. That owner was transferred, needed to leave town and accepted a low-ball offer.

"I didn't like it," Myers said, but he understood. "If I were in his shoes, I'd have done it, too. Did the people up the street like it? No. But we understood it."

A couple of years ago, soaring real estate values kept the chatter at cocktail parties champagne-bubble bright, as neighbors swapped the latest stories about the sky-high prices people got when they sold. Reports of bidding wars and multiple offers made people feel as if they had money in their pockets.

Now, when neighbors gather together, the talk is still real estate, but the tone can be somber. Instead of how high did it fly, they ask how low did it go. That's because the competition to sell a house now can be cutthroat: In August, there were 40,870 houses on the market in the Washington area, up from 18,368 in August 2005, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc., the area's multiple listing service.

And many have noticed that the house with the lowest price often moves first.

Young mothers Alyssa Hoard-Stewart, Nicola Bullis and Jenny Kelly gather at the intersection of Tinsman and Woods Edge drives in Leesburg each afternoon to greet their children scrambling off the school bus. As they keep an eye out for the bus and warn the littlest kids against running into the street, they watch for-sale signs sprouting around their still-new subdivision. When they first moved there a couple of years ago, prices were rising quickly. Recently, though, it took a neighbor a year after listing his house to sell it.