May 31, 2007

The Mystery of the Thirteen Lockboxes

Above are the lockboxes outside of Quincy Court at 1117 10th St NW. Not quite Logan, not quite NOMA. Near the convention center and loads of other condo/lofts. Walkable to downtown. (A transitional 'hood going from abandoned to "upscale," somewhere on the road from dangerous to no man's land.)

The 13 lockboxes look dramatic and suggest the condo bubble is bursting because there are soooo..... many unsold units. So how come the MLS only has six units listed accordning to ZipRealty?

Upon closer inspection two of the six units are list by JP Real Estate Group and another two by condo marketer McWilliams/Ballard Inc. The JP Group website lists yet another unit as well, so seven total. Sounds fishy. What's going on here? How many units are there? Have the realtors forgotten to remove thier lockboxes after a unit sold? Unlikely.

My dear Watson, units being mothballed by the developer!!! Indubitably. Or maybe not. Prices have begun to creep up, but that could be artificially created by developers holding on to units. If I had deep enough pockets that what I would be doing too.

2 comments:

Grand Marnier said...

I don't think that all these units are being held by the developer, but who knows... Carr (the developer) closed on the building about a year ago, and from the looks of it, almost all of the units are now being lived in (I can't believe that there are more than 14 units in a 110 unit building open). Like Quincy Park (across the street), there were a LOT of people flipping units, and I assume that some were double flippers--maybe it's these people who are having problems reselling their units? Either that, or realtors are lazy (which could very well be the case).

Anonymous said...

Nothing so nefarious - the most recent listings go to the top when sorted by date, so a sales company doesn't throw them all on MLS at once. DC.gov's property sales are available online - that's a good way to look at who owns the units (of course, it takes them a while to update those...).