Very interesting data! Having signed a contract in November (closing in 3 weeks), I would feel very fortunate to have purchased at or near the bottom.
I have given up on trying to predict the housing market, though-- too many factors go into it.
My belief is prices in the NOVA area will stay flat for a couple years, or appreciate at more normal levels (2-3%). Incomes have a long way to go to catch up to home prices, and now that the curtain has been pulled back on "tricky financing," my hope is that the horror stories of people being upside down on their homes will encourage the rest of us to buy only what we can afford with a traditional fixed mortgage.
Most people still have lots of equity in their homes- those who bought after 2004 don't. I think the recent slight increase in Loudoun home prices reflects that recent purchasers gave up on flipping and put their places up for rent. Anyone who has to sell is selling, but those who have a choice have decided not to buy that new construction dream home for now.

John and R. Timm, I too get the error message that I submitted too many comments in too short a period of time and IT'S MY BLOG!. I'm researching this and will get it fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

John, the chart above is rendered with Java Script. You will have to enable Java in your browser if it is not enabled. Next, try upgrading your Flash player to Version 8. Let me know if neither of these work.

Next, I omitted homes over $1,000,000 and only included "detached, single family" (also omitting townhouses, condos and coops). Over $1 million distorts the averages for SF and condos and TH's distort the averages on the downside. The chart above includes the majority of what is on the market today: detached, single family under $1 Million. The Daily market watch includes everything except new construction.

When I have time, I will do condos, Th's and SF over $1 Million as separate studies. All of this is manual extraction of data from the MLS.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the graph and analysis it looks good. I think it is helpful to remove the over 1M houses to prevent the average from being skewed greatly by a small number of super lux properties.

I wonder if the sharp decline in Sept. wasn't overstated by a shift in product mix towards smaller houses or by more activity in a different region of the county. It would be interesting to see what % of sales are occuring East of Leesburg v. West of Leesburg in a given month because I assume that could have a great impact on the average price. This variability is probably not as apparent in Fairfax county where development is fairly dense across the entire county.

First of all, for some reason, perhaps because of the recent changes you have made, the charts no longer render in my browser, which is IE 6, and I think pretty standard. So I can't see the charts, but I wonder if by excluding resales over $1M, you are changing the nature of the stats you are getting, particularly if you were not excluding this portion of the market before.
John