A Lot to Like, and Maybe to Buy

Others have a different perspective. "It's a great time to build a new home," said Frederick County real estate appraiser Wayne Six. Finding a lot in Frederick County is easier and more affordable than it has been in years, he said, and builders with land they acquired speculatively when the market was high are willing to deal on the price of a house as long as they know they have a buyer at the other end.

Builders are trying to stay alive, Six said, and if that means squeezing their own profits to entice a custom buyer, they're willing to do it.

"Land is a good deal right now," said Mark Hastings, an agent with Re/Max Gateway in Chantilly. In fact, he said, prices have fallen more sharply in Northern Virginia than in the Maryland suburbs because the real estate bubble had gotten bigger in Virginia.

In Prince William County, 10 to 15 acres of land can be had for $375,000 to $400,000, said Shawn Cody, president of Cherokee Homes in Nokesville and treasurer of the Northern Virginia Building Industry Association.

"There's been a pickup in interest from individual buyers who were sitting on the fence," he said, because buyers are starting to see the market bottom out.

Yet that doesn't mean people are jumping to build. Cody called the increased interest "a small ray of sunshine starting to come out."

Hastings said he's seeing a lot of nervousness from potential buyers worried that they will get in over their heads and then not be able to sell their custom home.

"The people who are building are in the more affluent range," he said.

Residential architect Craig Stewart of Stewart-McCready Architects in Ellicott City agreed that existing homes can be a better value per square foot, but he spoke of the allure of the custom home.

"The site shapes your house," he said, in a way that it never shapes a tract house.

And even with custom-building costs at $300 a square foot, ordinary people can have custom homes, Stewart said. It's simply a matter of deciding to have a smaller house but one unlike any other.

However, it has become less common in the past quarter-century for people to build custom homes, he said. In the 1980s, he said, people were building their own homes "right and left." In the 1990s, about half his work was custom homes, and now it's about 20 percent, the rest remodeling jobs.