Reply to Examples of “nice homes” in NoVa

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "Examples of “nice homes” in NoVa"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Arlington is SO UGLY and it kills me because the convenience can’t be matched and we love the amenities. CCH is the exception but there’s a bunch of awful new builds popping up there too that are killing the feel of the neighborhood. I don’t get it because the average new builds in Vienna and Alexandria are 10x more charming. Why?? The only thing I can find is the Arlington builders tend to be different from the Vienna ones and so on. [/quote]
I’d love to see a new build in the style of Alexandria homes in Arlington and McLean![/quote]

Most of these charming Alexandria City homes are old classic stately homes built with brick on all four sides and slate roofs that have been tastefully renovated and maintained. These construction materials are ridiculously expensive to use in a new build in 2026.

Developers doing new builds in the $1.8 - 3 million range in Arlington would be unprofitable if they built with these classic materials. It’s near-impossible to do, unless someone commissions a custom home — and even then they’d likely have to pay cash or cover a big appraisal gap to get a mortgage.[/quote]

Fair point. I’m not at all knowledgeable about the options, but surely there’s a middle ground between the entirely brick and slate stately homes from a bygone era and the 100 percent vinyl McMansions that are cropping up? I guess not for builders looking to maximize profit.

I am surprised that the subset of folks who are spending several million on a house aren’t working directly with a builder to build a custom house with higher end materials, but I’m not of that subset, so perhaps the preference is to maximize square footage with cheaper materials![/quote]

Going to take more than several million to do what you are talking about in Arlington, and most people don’t see the value of spending that money when you can get substantially cheaper materials that will do 90 pct of what they want - with the exception of impressing people who are stuck in some antiquated mindset of what housing stock should look like. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics