REGIONAL SPOTLIGHT
WASHINGTON D.C.
Regional Spotlight: Washington, D.C.
THE CAPITOL CITY’S MARKET IS MORE COMPLEX THAN YOU MIGHT EXPECT.
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
W
proper,” said Brad Chandler, CEO of Ex- press Homebuyers, which operates in the greater metro area of the city. “Even with extremely tight inventory in that area (two months or less), we aren’t seeing much in the way of price appreciation. With that kind of inventory, D.C. proper still only saw about two percent appreci- ation over the course of 2017.” Despite not yet having achieved the official-recovery benchmark on a broader scale, the D.C.-area housing market is certainly growing and gaining value. Think Realty contributor Ingo Winzer recently observed in Forbes the three-year price growth forecast for the area is about 11 percent, and warned that an attractive, high-growth market like D.C. could become overpriced in the next few years. Craig Fuhr, a Maryland-based fix-and-flip investor and founder of FlipClub, described his market as “hot, like 2004 again.” Fuhr’s retail buyers often have work-related interests in the D.C. area or work for the federal
hen the national housing mar- ket collapsed in the mid-2000s,
Washington, D.C., homes lost nearly $120,000, on average, from their overall value. Median home prices in the area bottomed out in July 2009 around $355,000, a steep fall from values of $435,000 just two years earlier. For a market that had grown accustomed to double-digit annual appreciation rates over the course of the early 2000’s, it was a hard fall to handle. In fact, the Capitol still has not achieved official recovery status, since home values fell 27.5 per- cent during the crash and have recovered 24.4 percent of those losses. A market is not considered fully recovered until it recovers all ground lost in the down- turn. D.C. market values are, overall, still between nine and 10 percent lower than peak values prior to the housing crash. Investors should note, however, that some areas in D.C. proper and the Arlington, Virginia area have exceeded those peak prices and are starting to level off. “You can see it, in particular, in D.C.
54 | think realty magazine :: april 2018
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