The Standard and Poor's /Case-Shiller Home Price Indices   track average home prices in metropolitan statistical areas across the U. S. There is a two-month lag in collecting data and publishing it.

One index tracks the entire Washington DC area including the Maryland suburbs but not including Baltimore and surrounds. It extends as far away as Spotsylvania, Clarke and Warren Counties in VA. It does not, therefore,  provide the granularity that would allow us to evaluate what is usually considered Northern Virginia by itself.   Still, it is useful for evaluating regional trends versus those in other metro areas.

It assigns a value for every month since January 1987. The index sets January 2000 with the base value of "100" across all tracked metropolitan areas.

The January 1987 value for the Washington D.C.area was 64.11. 

We see home values increasing until May 1990 when they peaked at 93.01 for an increase of 45%. This marked the beginning of a long, gradual decline that bottomed finally in April 1996 at 87.80 or a 4.51% decrease. (This number is startling to a broker who remembers much larger declines in actual individual sales prices in Fairfax County.)

From that point, there was a general plateau in home values until February 1998 (89.33). Then, an almost uninterrupted climb in values began, crossing 100 in January 2000 and accelerating to 250.99 in June 2006 for a 181% increase. (As a reference, the Los Angeles metropolitan area peaked a month later at 273.83 for a 272% increase since its bottom point in February 1997.)

We were in a strong downward correction until March 2009 then began to climb back up to the level of November 2008 .  Important milestones are shown here:

 (latest data published January 2010)

From the data, we calculate a decline of 30.5% over three years. This does not accurately reflect that Prince William County home prices have declined much faster, driven partly by an inordinate number of foreclosed properties. At the same time, prices in the closer-in (to D.C.) neighborhoods are resisting the decline.

Updated 02-15-2010.   Copyright Pat Fales.