But Tammy and Charles Bloomer are losing more than $100,000 on their Silver Spring home, which they bought for $525,000 four years ago. The house, now under contract to be sold, lost value even though the couple had remodeled the kitchen and replaced the roof, furnace and windows.

"Unfortunately, we bought at the peak of the market," said Tammy Bloomer, a federal worker who is moving to take a job in Chicago. "The market is terrible now."

In the past six months, most Washington area sellers have lost money on houses they purchased since prices started climbing in 2000, according to a Washington Post analysis of residential sales. In the first three months of this year, 62 percent of local home sellers accepted less than they paid for their homes, in part because aggressively priced foreclosures have dragged down prices around the region.

While the drop is painful for sellers, experts say it is a necessary part of getting past the excesses of the boom years. This region experienced one of the sharpest run-ups in home prices in the nation. Those prices must be brought down in order for buyers and sellers to deal with each other on more equal footing, as they had for decades before the boom.

Predictions vary about when the region's prices will hit bottom. They may keep tumbling until late 2009 for close-in communities and until 2011 in outlying suburbs, according to a study by real estate research firm Delta Associates and the local Multiple Listing Service. But so much depends on whether the economy suffers some unforeseen blow and on how many more foreclosures the banks add to an already-bloated housing supply.

Of course, these falling prices are reason to celebrate for would-be home buyers, especially coupled with low mortgage interest rates and the $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time buyers.

But as long as distress sales continue to dominate, the market will not bounce back to normal, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of Harvard University's center for housing studies. "The norm requires that a preponderance of transactions take place between willing buyers and sellers, not sellers who would take any price to unload a property."

By that measure, Kimberly Thompson's Upper Marlboro community has not hit bottom.

In Thompson's Zip code, the proportion of homes in some stage of foreclosure is twice the national rate, according to RealtyTrac, a private company that follows those statistics. Many more homes, including her own, are listed as short sales. Those are arrangements that allow homeowners to sell for less than they owe on their mortgages.

Thompson and her husband bought their house for $564,000 in late 2007. He lost his job six months later. By then, the home's value had dropped by $100,000. This week, it is under contract for $372,000.

"We were down to one income, one kid and one on the way," said Thompson, a computer programmer. "We realized we did not have money to cover the mortgage and our other expenses."

Not everyone selling a home is doing so under duress. Many long-time homeowners with plenty of equity are making money when they sell, though not as much as they would have a few years back. Others may be losing money, but that does not mean they are on the brink of foreclosure.

Emily Lenzner, for instance, has plenty of equity in her Adams Morgan condominium. She bought the condo in 2005 for $715,000. Two years later, she moved to a house with her new husband and their four kids. She rented out her place for a while, then listed it for $849,000. No takers. It's back on the market for $674,000.

"I'm going to take a loss, but I can really use the cash," Lenzner said.

As the region's foreclosure crisis has deepened, outlying suburbs have taken a bigger hit than more established areas. That's because there was a higher proportion of recent sales in those fast-growing suburbs, leaving them more exposed to the subprime mortgages that were popular at the time.

Subprime loans catered to people with blemished credit, often allowing them to buy homes they otherwise could not afford. That helped inflate prices. But these borrowers began defaulting in record numbers in 2007. Foreclosures followed. The markets that crashed the hardest were the ones where prices had climbed the fastest.

Home prices have held steady in the District, according to The Post analysis. In the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, prices for single-family homes are down to where they were five years ago. In Prince William and Loudoun counties, a flood of foreclosures has pushed prices so low that bargain hunters have flocked there in recent months, helping to boost sales.

But while in past slumps a surge in sales has signaled the start of a rebound, this downturn is unlike any in recent times and it's premature to call a recovery, said Barry Merchant, senior housing policy analyst at the Virginia Housing Development Authority.

The encouraging signs have been offset by more troublesome ones, he said. After tapering off for a few months, foreclosures in Northern Virginia are starting to creep up again and may keep climbing now that several lenders have lifted foreclosure moratoriums.

Meanwhile, the year-over-year sales increases of the past few months are petering out in some Virginia suburbs, suggesting that interest in the fire-sale prices may have peaked, Merchant said. In April, Loudoun sales declined 12.5 percent from a year earlier.

"If sales are not increasing and foreclosures are on the uptick, then the question is: 'Is there another shoe to fall?' " Merchant said. "Maybe what we were hoping was the bottom was just a bump on the way down."

The shrinking supply of homes for sale may not be a sign of much, either. As of April, if sales continued at the same pace, the Washington region would have had a 7.7-month supply of homes. That's down from 10.9 months at the same time last year but still worse than the five- to six-month supply found in a healthy market, the Delta report said. This region had But it may be that individual sellers are pulling their homes off the market, refusing to compete with foreclosure prices.

"I can't tell you how many listing appointments my team scheduled only to have the client say: 'You know what, we're just going to just stay put and hold out on selling for a while," said Melissa Stewart, a Century 21 real estate agent who works in Fredericksburg. "We've had probably eight of those in the past month and a half."

The Bloomers did not have that luxury. When they bought their Silver Spring house, they thought they would make enough money when they sold it to buy another home and to help pay off their son's college loans. Now, they are hunting for a rental in Chicago.