Annandale Housing Older, Market Slower than County Average

This is part one of a three-part series on the housing market and real estate in Annandale and how it has evolved over the years.

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Part 2:
Part 3:

Building houses is in Mike Pyne’s blood.

Pyne, who was raised in Annandale and co-owns , a residential design, build and remodel company, watched as his grandfather and later father built houses around the community from the 1940s through the 1970s. As a youngster, Pyne visited building sites with his father on Saturdays, shoveling gravel or performing other tasks fitted for a boy his age.

Pyne has seen Annandale’s housing trends change over the years first-hand.

“When (my grandfather) was doing it, there were mostly bungalows, little post-war, four-square kind of boxes, small houses on big huge lots kind of thing, where they were basically subdividing farm land into individual lots that they sold to individual people, then everyone built their own house,” he said. “And then in the [1960s], when my father got into it, it was more subdivisions.”

Annandale’s building boom ebbed by the 1970s. As a result, according to Fairfax County data, the average age of Annandale homes is older than the county average. Nearly 23 percent of homes in Annandale were built before 1960, and just more than 40 percent were built during the 1960s.

Other parts of the county, on the other hand, saw growth booms in the 1970s and 1980s. (See the PDFs attached to this article to compare areas of Fairfax County.)

Housing grew by just more than 9 percent in Annandale between 1980 and 2010, compared to nearly 84 percent for Fairfax County on average, according to county data. Planning districts with the highest growth during that time were Bull Run, Fairfax, Lower and Upper Potomac and Rose Hill.

Only about 2 percent of homes in Annandale were built between 2000 and 2010, the lowest in any other county planning districts, according Fairfax County data. On average, countywide housing growth during the same time period was more than 11 percent.

The most recent high-growth districts are Fairfax, with more than 20 percent new units during the last decade; Upper Potomac/Herndon, with more than 17 percent growth, Lincolnia, with more than 14 percent growth; and to a lesser extent Bull Run and Vienna.

Mason District Supervisor Penny Gross called Annandale one of the “first rings around the core city.”

“It was one of the first suburbs of Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Many of our communities were built in the fifties.”

These homes were typically smaller houses, Gross said. “And they’re pretty much still sturdy housing on nice lots, and also many of them have mortgages that have been paid off. It’s when they were building ‘housing for heroes’—that’s what they called it—after the war.”

Executive Director Vicki Burman said the housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s was due largely to Annandale’s proximity to jobs in Arlington or Washington and nearby highways. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, developers began constructing townhouses in order to maximize space and provide additional housing options.

“It enabled a number of younger couples to purchase a townhouse as their first home, rather a house on a single piece of property,” Burman said.

Housing that Lasts

Today, houses are being crowded into existing neighborhoods as demand for housing continues to increase, she said. “A lot of our developments are older, and now we’re starting to see more infill, just as you saw in Arlington, just a half acre lot here or there.”

Annandale has a higher percentage of single-family houses—62 percent of all homes in the district—than the county average. As a whole, the county has far more townhouses but about the same percentage of apartments.

Homes in Annandale are also cheaper, on average, than in other parts of Fairfax County. The median market value for all types of non-rental housing in the Annandale district in 2010 was $387,986, compared to a countywide average of $418,440.

Pyne’s wife and business partner, Debi, said Annandale today has fairly diverse housing.

“It’s a bedroom community,” she said. “There’s single-family homes. There’s plenty of nice little townhouse communities. There are some apartment complexes, but I know from a demographic standpoint, there is a shortage of what we could consider more upscale apartments.”

From a business standpoint, the couple loves that the community has a large stock of renovatable material. Personally, they love the diversity of housing styles, natural landscape contours and mature trees that are often lacking in newer housing developments.

Annandale, Gross said, remains a great place to “live, work and do business. So what we’ve seen in Annandale is good, well-built housing that was designed to last for generations, and that’s exactly what it’s done.”

Check Annandale Patch on Wednesday morning for part two.