Bethesda Real Estate Sales Report

A look into the Washington DC area real estate market through examining micro-markets.In this specific case, we compared homes and townhomes sales data in Bethesda "downtown and vicinity" (Zip Code 20814) Maryland inJanuary 2007 and January 2008.Here's a recap and analysis:

Bethesda Homes and Townhomes (For Zip Code 20814)

 * rounded to nearest whole number / per MRIS data

Because it's so hard to generalize real estate trends in a county, or even a "city"/area like Bethesda, we (Kevin Koitz and I) are going to continue to run a series of monthly market comparisons by zip code.  The shortcomings in such an analysis are two-fold.  The first is that a zip code can contain very different "Micro-markets" and a trend in a zip code may not reflect the trends in every micro market within a zip code.  For example, many subdivisions in downtown Bethesda (20814) are still performing better than areas to the north in 20814.  The second shortcoming is that the data pool from month to month in a zip code can be limited creating a greater probability of statistical abnormalities.  For instance, if a very expensive house sells with only a limited data pool, the average sales price will reflect this abnormality.

However, we feel this data is a good start as an information source.  In this particular case, although the volume of sales for homes in Bethesda (20814) is considerably down from last year at this time, it's clear that "the sky is not falling" with only slight reduction of the average sales price.