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The Washington, D.C., Real Estate Market

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Some real estate analysts have noted that Washington, DC is always going to have a stable, strong real estate market; after all, the government’s not going anywhere.

Even though DC has a stable real estate market, it also has a growing market. Over the past three years, DC has added seventy-five thousand jobs each year (the highest job growth rate in the country) and had an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent. This economic growth produces a strong real estate market, both in housing for these new workers and in commercial properties.

For the young professionals who are moving to DC, the city has thousands of apartments. Unfortunately for these professionals, however, DC apartments are very pricey compared to the rest of the country. In Fairfax County, for example, the average price for a top-quality apartment is about sixteen hundred dollars (add about two hundred dollars for a townhouse).

Home prices are likewise high and rising; in the year prior to May 2005, median home prices rose twenty-three percent, a figure two and a half times the national average. If you go all the way back to January 2003, the prices have risen forty-eight percent. The average home rental is over twenty-one hundred dollars, and there is an eighty-five absorption rate. Some houses are selling for more than fifty percent above the asking price.

Commercial real estate growth mirrors that of the residential community. The price of office buildings has risen twenty-seven percent in one year, even though DC has restrictive building codes that prohibit skyscrapers.

The booming real estate market is expected to slow, but it will likely continue to rise slowly, and at least avoid plummeting; after all, the government’s not going anywhere.

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