kennyboy: are we in a democrap depression ??? washingtonpost.com
Camping Out for the Chance to Buy an Upscale Home
By David Cho and Sandra Fleishman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page A01
Camping out to get tickets for a Justin Timberlake concert or the first showing of "The Lord of the Rings" is old. Now people are queuing up for days in tents and under tarps for the chance to buy expensive new homes.
Louie Guimmule is among hundreds of people who want to buy into Chatham Square, Old Town Alexandria's newest townhouse development, where prices start at $560,000 and reach $1.1 million. When he stopped by the construction site last Saturday, dozens of prospective buyers, sleeping bags in hand, were lined up -- a full seven days before the developer was planning to accept contracts on the first, still-unbuilt units.
So Guimmule rushed to his apartment a few miles away, grabbed his North Face tent, staked a spot in line and hunkered down for the cold nights ahead.
"I was not prepared. I had to run home [to get supplies] and pay somebody to stay in my spot," Guimmule, a network engineer, said with a tinge of regret in his voice. "It showed you what kind of demand there was."
Tents spread along a street of historic homes in Old Town are one of the more public manifestations of the hot real estate market in the Washington area, where prices in some neighborhoods have doubled in the past few years. With low interest rates, unemployment below the national average and projections that new construction cannot keep up with the flood of new residents, there are few signs that things are slowing down. And there is an element of speculation to the lines: People are hoping that by buying early, they will pay far less than later buyers because prices will keep climbing.
Aaron Kilinski, an information technology consultant, said he has slept out on the streets of Arlington County twice: once to buy a million-dollar townhouse and once to buy an investment condo that cost more than $500,000. If he had purchased later, he said, prices would have jumped by tens of thousands of dollars. |
