In Prince William, A Spike in Home Sales

Segen and Kalani Kauo, with their children Kalani, 3, and Tatiyana, 2, said they could not afford to buy until recently. (By Dayna Smith For The Washington Post)

There are other pockets of the country experiencing upticks. They tend to be markets where prices climbed most sharply, then fell the hardest when the boom ended.

But it's premature to predict a recovery based on such market shifts, housing experts said. In past slumps, a surge in sales typically signaled the start of a rebound. But this slump is unlike any in recent history. Never before have prices climbed so high, so quickly and then dropped so precipitously.

"We don't have any data to know what a normal recovery is in this case," said John McClain, deputy director at George Mason's Center for Regional Analysis. "What we're experiencing is new territory."

The macroeconomics of it all hardly matters to Angela and Sidney McMillion, who could not afford as big a house as they wanted in Prince William a few years ago.

Instead, they settled in West Virginia near family, although Sidney McMillion kept working as a foreman at an asphalt plant in Occoquan. For five years, he stayed with relatives in Prince William on work days and commuted 280 miles on weekends to see his wife and three daughters, ages 3 to 16.

Tired of the distance, Angela McMillion started looking online at foreclosures in Prince William and noticed those homes were selling for about the same as houses in her neighborhood. "We saw the phenomenal prices on the foreclosures and thought: 'It's time to live together as a family again."

In May, the couple bought a six-bedroom foreclosure with a large addition for $180,000 in Dale City. They're paying only $300 more a month than they did on their West Virginia mortgage, which is offset by gas savings.

"To find anything comparable to that before would have been impossible," Angela McMillion said.

Earlier in this decade, builders expanded aggressively in the county, taking advantage of its wide open spaces to meet booming demand for homes in the D.C. region.

Prices were lower than in most other parts of the region, attracting speculators and subprime borrowers with poor credit or little cash.

But when home prices started dropping around the country, many subprime borrowers could not afford the adjustable-rate mortgages they had, especially when they reset to drastically higher rates. With prices down, they could not sell or refinance their way out of trouble.

Foreclosures followed, and as more of them got dumped on the market, they pushed down prices in entire communities in Prince William County.

It got to the point where it no longer made sense for Kevin Ogrince to rent. "I looked around and it became clear that I could own a home for less than I could rent one," said Ogrince, who owns an auto body shop in Manassas. "I scoured the market for foreclosures."

In January, he found one and bought it for $160,000. The three-bedroom house had sold for $380,000 in 2004, he said. He pays about $1,200 a month on the mortgage, instead of $1,500 in rent, the going rate for most places he looked.

Coming up with a 10 percent down payment was tough. Ogrince set up a cot in his auto body shop and lived there a few months until he got his finances in order. But it was not nearly the struggle it would have been had he been buying at the 2004 prices.

"If I had the same circumstances in 2004, it would have been really impossible to get that kind of money together," he said. "I'd be sleeping on the same cot -- or renting."