Governor Kaine announced the Virginia recipients of the Neighborhood Stabilization fund grants yesterday. Unfortunately, neither Fauquier or Culpeper made the cut. Incredibly, Prince William county doesn't appear to have gotten a dime!

This would have had a small impact, but every little bit helps.

There was a little money given to Shenandoah, Frederick and Warren counties, $2.5 million for all three combined.

I'm not sure you could argue they are harder hit than places like Culpeper. In fact, I'd make a pretty good argument against that.

CLARIFICATION/CORRECTION:

It appears Prince William got funds as part of an earlier $7 million award, along with Fairfax county.

The original announcement said there was $20 million available for the Open Submission portion of the program and another $10 million available for the Competitive Program. Between the $17.5 announced yesterday and the earlier $7 million awards, there should be another roughly $5 million available. So there may yet be funds available for Fauquier and Culpeper.

I'm fully booked this weekend showing properties to potential buyers.

Great news, right?

Here's the thing, out of all those buyers, not one of them wants to see anything in Fauquier, Culpeper, Rappahannock or Warren Counties.

Next week I'm going to do a very, very specific analysis between a few houses in comparable subdivisions in Fauquier, Prince William and Loudon counties. I think the price comparisons will be surprising to a lot of people.

Other Coming Attractions Next Week:

• Early Peek at August Numbers
• Poplar Springs Efforts to Go Green
• Re-inventing Warrenton

Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend!

I saw this article on Friday, but I hate to go into the weekend on a bad news note! So, I saved it for Monday! Just what you needed, right?!

There are still buyers out there. There will always be buyers out there!

The pool is small and you're going to have to knock yourself out to get them to your house. And, if they're not coming to your house, it's over priced!

And, this article from the New York Times will probably interest buyers and sellers. The numbers here are national. (Our local numbers are worse.) But I think the letter to sellers is a good idea. Sellers, given the inventory in Culpeper, Rappahannock, Fauquier and Warren counties, I don't think I'd try the letter to the buyer. They really do have all the cards right now!

Today, finally, I'll get around to talking about the numbers for Warren County.

Inventory in Warren County has stayed relatively stable month over month. There were 560 homes listed for sale in February and 567 in March. No significant difference there. Surprisingly enough, Warren County is the one county where there's very little difference year over year in this number. In March of 2007 there were 558 homes listed.

93 new listings came on the market in February. March was up slightly with 98. There's a significant difference in last year's numbers, however. In March of 2007 there were 161 new listings.

We do start to see some differences with contracts, month over month. In February there were 22 new contracts. In March that jumped up to 34. Of course, that's less impressive when you consider that a year ago there were 52 new contracts.

There were 24 closed sales in March, 22 in February and a year ago there were 39.

Overall, the patterns are similar to what we've seen in the other counties.

Prices in Warren County are down almost 17% year over year. It's worse than Fauquier, Culpeper or Rappahannock, but not as bad as Prince William.

Next week I promise an end to all these boring statistics for awhile!

I saw today that a TV station in Charlotte, NC did a story on how the real estate market is increasing the numbers of homeless pets. As families are forced to leave their homes they often can not take their pets with them. Sometimes that's because they have to move into a rental that won't accept pets. Some families are moving in with family members and the home can't accomodate any more pets.

I've got calls into the local shelters to try and get a feel for whether we're seeing that same effect here locally. My suspicion would be that we are.

If you're thinking of getting a pet it's an excellent time to check out the local shelters. Here are links to some of them.

Rappahannock

Fauquier

Culpeper

Warren

Too many pets end up here in the best of times. In hard economic times it gets worse. If you can adopt a pet or just help them out with a donation, now's the time.

The New York Times has an interesting map showing the percentage of subprime mortgages by county throughout the US. I took a look at the rates for this area and the good news is that it could look a lot worse!

Here are some of the rates:

Fauquier County: 24%

Culpeper County: 33%

Rappahannock County: 21%

Prince William County: 33%

Warren County: 29%

Loudon County: 22%

This puts us in pretty good shape relative to some of the hardest hit states, such as Florida, Nevada and California. And, some of the counties with the worst numbers are in places where they did not experience the extraordinary surge in home values.

It's also not much of a surprise to see Culpeper and Prince William Counties among the hardest hit. In Culpeper especially, I expect there's still a lot of pain to come.