Madison County Virginia Farm Real Estate Trends

For anyone desiring to purchase or sell real estate, understanding the market is crucial to making wise investment decisions. Each quarter my firm, Gayle Harvey Real Estate, Inc., evaluates the market information provided by the Charlottesville Association of Realtors and creates charts and graphs to visually represent the current real estate market for specific types of properties and locations throughout the ten county region that we represent. In this post, I’ll be sharing with you the information that we have collected for Madison County. While the Multiple Listing Service does not distinguish between real farms and homes with acreage, we are forced to only show homes with acreage. I will refer to them as “farms” though. I know this can be a little deceiving as there is certainly a difference in the value of a property that has 50 acres of nice pasture land and one that sits on the side of a wooded mountain side. Given that, these numbers are generalities and every property is unique and dependent on location for its true value.

The chart to the left shows how many “farms” have sold in Madison County since the first quarter of 2007. The red lines show 22-50 acres, blue 51-100 acres and the black 100+ acres. Whenever the line hits the Y axis the number of sales for that quarter were zero.

The chart to the right shows the median sold price for the “farms” in Madison County. With so few farms selling it is difficult to make any definitive judgments from this particular chart.

The chart below gives us a better picture of the market over the past few years and unfortunately Madison farms have not been immune from the effects of the recession.While back in 2007 & 2008 the price per acre was nearly $10,000/acre for larger acreage, today it is ranging around $6,000 per acre.

Over the years I have seen much of the demand for Madison County farms come from Northern Virginia. The DC area markets appear to be improving, so as a result we may see an increase in demand for some of our local farms which serve many in that area as retreats from the fast paced, traffic-snarled living that they experience there.