Workplace Security

It's taken many a year, but Fauquier County has finally licked its affordable housing problem.

Fauquier.com blogger, Realtor Julie Emery, posted a recent entry that outlined the history of an Old Town Warrenton home that was sold in 2003 for $165,000. It sold again at the height of the boom, in August 2006, for $353,999. The owner who bought it at that time eventually lost the home to foreclosure when the bottom dropped out of the market.

Last April, the bank listed it for $369,900, leading us to believe the Bank of Mars was holding the paper. It eventually lowered the price, then lowered it again, then finally sold it.

For $137,800.

"This is a house that was not trashed by the last owners," Emery wrote. "It was in as good a condition when they left as when they bought it."

The lesson? "There are some incredible deals out there," Emery said.

Indeed there are.

We had a note from another local Realtor late last week.

"Unfortunately, there are numerous homeowners that are either behind in their mortgage payments or who have received foreclosure notices," he wrote. "Did you know that seven out of 10 homes that go to foreclosure have never been listed for sale?

"Did you know that most homeowners don't know that if you owe more on your home than it is worth, and you need to sell it because of a hardship such as loss of job, divorce or numerous other reasons, that the bank will actually pay the commission, closing costs and negotiate with the seller on the shortfall on the mortgage through a short sale?"

Help me get the word out, he pleaded.

So here it is. You're welcome.

Buyers are, in fact, as eager as they have ever been to own homes. The prices are right and credit is available, if not as widely as before.

Buyer's market and Fauquier County have not often shown up in the same sentence, certainly not with the regularity that they now seem to couple, and if there were one little piece that could fit into the puzzle, we would witness a frenzy of activity in the real estate market hereabouts.

More's the shame, no one seems able to come up with the missing piece — job security — and its lack is keeping the market down. Where once the decline in the housing market was driving job market woes, now it is the other way around.

The housing market is not going to turn around — neither will cars, nor retail, nor anything else — until someone comes up with a way to keep people employed, with a way to keep people more upright if they are not, with a way to fund health and other types of insurance for jobless Americans, or a scheme to suspend or otherwise adjust mortgages and other major bills during a jobless stint — or perhaps some combination of them all.

In meetings with reluctant Republican members of Congress last week, President Obama promised to use the remaining $350 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program money on the housing crisis.

Laudable, we suppose, but a day late and a dollar short. We'd rather see him invest in jobs. That's where the real problem lies.

Fix the job market, and the housing market will take care of itself.