As Usual, It All Comes Down to Where

You've got to admire their guts, at least. And in the end, you might marvel at their timing.

On Aug. 16, the same day financial markets across much of the world were coming unglued, Erin Fuller and her husband, Michael Leurdijk, listed for sale their three-bedroom bungalow on N. Edgewood Street in Arlington.

This little house rivals Tai Shan for cuteness, and it's in a popular neighborhood, Lyon Park, near Metro. But with an asking price of $899,000, a buyer would probably need a loan well above the jumbo threshold of $417,000. And jumbos are among the loans being shunned by mortgage-bond investors, who lately have been too frightened to invest in anything unless Uncle Sam agrees to read them a bedtime story and place their cash under his mattress. Have these homeowners lost their senses?

Wall Street's spasms did give Fuller and Leurdijk pause. Leurdijk works as a financial consultant; it's not as if he wasn't aware of the turmoil. "We did a gut check on it, and we talked to our Realtor," Fuller said. "We stuck with our decision." They had already purchased a larger home in Arlington, and they figured there is not a lot available for sale in North Arlington at a price similar to the one they are asking.

Evidently they weren't the only ones not scared away from the market that week. Just three days after their house hit the multiple listing service, about 45 people dropped by for a Sunday open house, according to their agent, Lisa Joy, who works in the McLean office of the McEnearney Associates real estate brokerage.

Fuller and Leurdijk probably are not alone in that little gut-check business right now. Normally, late summer is a good time to jump in to the housing market. It usually springs back to life in September and October, following a slowdown in activity during July and August. But this year is different.

It has been a buyer's market for a year or more, depending on location. Companies that lend mortgage money are shutting down, closing offices or laying off employees. Companies that build houses are struggling as buyers back out of contracts. And a higher-than-usual number of homeowners find themselves stuck with a mortgage they can't pay or are even facing the loss of their homes to foreclosure.

Should a rational person sit out the market? If you're trying to buy, will you be able to get a mortgage? If you're trying to sell, will your buyer be able to get a mortgage? Should you wait until spring, when more of this financial mess might be fixed -- or at least better understood? They're all fair questions, given the reports from Wall Street.

Locally, the answers to those questions vary tremendously according to geography. There are two housing markets in the Washington area, divided roughly by the Beltway. The recovery has arrived for the District and close-in suburbs. It hasn't for communities farther outside Interstate 495. And in a few spots, most notably Manassas and Manassas Park, recovery is hard even to imagine.

In Arlington, Fuller and Leurdijk may have happened to hit the market's turn dead-on. In July, the median price for a single-family resale home in the county increased nearly 11 percent compared with a year earlier, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, the local multiple listing service. That was the first significant increase since prices headed south in July 2006. (Technically, there was a price increase of 0.2 percent in December, but that's barely enough to register.) Sales volume went up during July in Arlington as well. The number of sales was 7 percent higher than one year earlier.

Other close-in communities saw positive numbers in July as well:

In the District, the median price was 3.9 percent higher than a year ago, and the number of sales rose nearly 11 percent.