Is there a way to find the historical price of real estate? (Fairfax: sales, condo)

[vauser]

Going back, say, 3 or 4 decades. I am trying to do some analysis to get a sense for how real estate has been from an investment standpoint over a reasonably long period of time. If you have any insights on how one could do this, let me know.

Essentially, I would like to take a property (be it a SFH, Townhome, condo, or even commercial) & find out its ups and downs (more like stocks). The purpose to this exercise is to make some decisions on real estate we own, and some we might purchase down the road. Thanks!

[NovaOne]

You are not going to be able to find any useful information from a system-wide analysis such as historical pricing data. Real estate is highly local, down to the specific neighborhood, street, lot, and the home itself.

[Not2Picky]

You can look at the property tax database for the county you own in. That will give historical values by property or by street (by clicking into individual house listings).

[CAVA1990]

I'm sure if you took the median from a reasonable sample (maybe 100 per decade?) of prices in real estate ads from old newspapers in a given metro area you'd get pretty close.

[bornindc]

Other than on a macro scale you will have trouble easily finding this. The Fairfax Tax Assessor (DTA) site doesn't have assessments online that go that far back property-by-property, only about 15 years I think. They may have the data available for 30-40 years if you go in to their office, you could give them a call and ask, 703-222-8234. I'm sure they have the data you need, whether or not you can quickly access it or assemble it is another matter.

Barring that, for one property you can look up past sales on the DTA site (look up the property by address and click the "sales" tab): Fairfax County

For an area you can go street-by-street on the DTA site as Not2picky mentioned: search by the street only without using any exact address, it'll put all the properties on that street in a list. For each property click sales and you could put it all in a spreadsheet and crunch the numbers. This way you can get sale data going back 40-50 years and try do what the assessor does and establish values for the houses by year.

Hopefully you can just contact the DTA and get their assessment data for the past 40 years as that would be the fastest way if you can get it.

[CAVA1990]

I'll bet you'll find that home prices increased by the greatest percentage during the 1970s compared to each of the decades after. At least that's how it was where I"m from in Southern California.

[JfromReston]

The NoVA Real Esate Bubble Fall Out blog has a table of the Case-Schiller index for DC that goes back to January 1987.

[CAVA1990]

[Are you looking for something specific to NoVA or national in scope?

After re-reading your original post I think you'll be wasting your time. Over the long run, don't expect to make any more on real estate than any other type of investment. To paraphrase Friedman there's no such thing as a free ROI.

[kutra11]

As with any investment, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Hmmm, now where have I heard this one before?

[michgc]

If you look at the Fairfax County tax assessment site, you can find out what houses sold for each time it changed hands. If you find some homes that changed hands often, you might be able to get an idea of what prices were at different points in time.