So yesterday I got an e-mail advertisement for a listing in Hyattsville, Maryland. The home is a brick colonial on a 5000sf lot with an attached garage. It has 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths and, as far as I can tell seems to be in decent shape. The listing says there are hardwood floors under the carpet. The house has a full, walk out basement. The house is listed for $399,900.

For those of you who don't know Maryland geography, this is within 5 miles of the MD/DC border and very near a metro station.

I wanted to compare what you get for your money here. I looked at homes in Fauquier County priced between $395,000 and $405,000 First of all, there are only four detached homes in Fauquier County that meet these criteria. Two are in Bealeton and two are in Warrenton. Two of the homes are four years old, one is 13 years old and one is 98 years old. They have either three or four bedrooms. Three out of the four have lots of about 10,000sf. One is roughly 20,000sf.

There is no doubt at all that the homes in Fauquier County are larger with larger lots. In three quarters of the cases they're much newer. But I seriously wonder how many people are going to want to make the several hours a day commute into northern VA/DC for the extra house and lot space they would gain.

And that's a big part of our problem in the current environment. Make no mistake; most of the people who have been buying homes in Fauquier County over the last 10 years have been commuters. Right now, we have a product that's not competitive. Long commute time, no mass transit, crowded roads and expensive gas make the decision between here and Hyattsville a no-brainer for a lot of families.

Part of the key to getting us out of our current housing market slump is to fix this problem. It's going to be tough to deal with the commute time, gas prices and road congestion. Guess what that leaves us to work with? Can anybody say price???