Neighborhood Pulse: Adams Morgan Flips to +4.0%, Southwest Waterfront Slides to -16.2%, a $3.95M Sale Clears in 2 Days

This Week's Pulse

Fifty-five row home settlements closed across the tracked DC neighborhoods this week, and Adams Morgan did what Truxton Circle did seven days ago: it flipped its annual number from red to green. The rolling 12-month median jumped 10.1% to $1.22M and the year-over-year reading swung from -7.5% to +4.0%. Same caveat as last week, same column: 12 trailing sales, 21 days on market, 96.3% of ask. This is a comps story on a thin sample, not a demand surge. But two flips in two weeks, in neighborhoods that spent the spring underwater, is starting to look less like coincidence and more like sequence.

Northwest split down the middle. Cleveland Park's annual decline nearly tripled, from -5.1% to -13.9%, with the median sliding 5.2% to $1.28M on 12 sales. The same week, a five-bedroom on Cleveland Avenue produced the city's biggest closing at $3.95M in two days. Both facts are true, and the second one is the one that describes demand. Meanwhile Dupont Circle doubled its annual gain, from +3.3% to +6.8% on 59 trailing sales, with the median crossing to $1.80M at 15 days. On the deep samples, the high end is holding. On the thin ones, single closings are throwing the percentages around.

Southwest Waterfront's slide is not a blip anymore. The annual reading deepened from -6.2% to -16.2% and the median fell 9.5% to $901K, its second straight weekly drop and its third different YoY print in four weeks. Now the part that matters: the list-to-sale ratio ticked up to 99.5%, the firmest reading in the city outside the full-ask neighborhoods. Sellers are conceding nothing. When a median falls 9.5% while concessions shrink, the median is describing which houses closed, not what the neighborhood is worth. Navy Yard sat still at -9.9% on eight sales.

East of the park, the repair work ran a third straight week. Trinidad narrowed from -8.1% to -5.6% and its median climbed 2.7% to $590K, which means something quietly notable: Trinidad no longer holds the bottom rung alone. It closed the week tied with Brightwood, which slipped 1.7% going the other direction. Truxton Circle held its green print at +1.3%. U Street narrowed to -16.2% from -18.0%. And Capitol Hill reversed last week's backslide, improving from -4.9% to -3.3% with DOM down to 9 days on 320 sales, the deepest sample in the dataset.

The velocity extremes both stretched. Kalorama Triangle's DOM jumped from 51 to 61 days, now the slowest market in the city, while Mount Pleasant held at five days and full ask. Mount Vernon Square, a three-sale market, posted the strangest row in the table: -44.4% on the annual line and 98.3% of ask, up from 85.8% a week ago. And Kalorama's long tail finally cleared, with two closings at 213 and 182 days on market, at 92.5% and 87.1% of original ask. The high end is not frozen. It is negotiating slowly, and losing.

Top Movers

Adams Morgan $1.22M, +4.0% YoY, +10.1% MoM. DOM 21, L2S 96.3%. 12 trailing sales. Four prints in four weeks: -24.5%, -12.9%, -7.5%, +4.0%. That is what a thin-sample recovery looks like when the weak comps roll out of the window and stronger closings roll in. The velocity has not caught up: 21 days and 96.3% of ask still leave buyers real room to work. Rising comps with soft terms is the same window Truxton opened last week. These windows close from the terms side first.

Southwest Waterfront $901K, -16.2% YoY, -9.5% MoM. DOM 20, L2S 99.5%. 28 trailing sales. Three different annual prints in a month: +1.4%, -6.2%, now -16.2%. This column has said it twice and the table keeps proving it: 28 sales is a window that swings hard on mix. The number that refuses to move is the one to trust. At 99.5% of ask, sellers here are conceding less than almost anyone in the city. The median is bouncing on which row houses happened to close, not on weakness.

Cleveland Park $1.28M, -13.9% YoY, -5.2% MoM. DOM 17, L2S 96.4%. 12 trailing sales. The annual decline nearly tripled in seven days, and the same neighborhood hosted the week's biggest sale, $3.95M on Cleveland Avenue in two days. Twelve sales is a median where every closing rewrites the story. The street-level read: buyers at the top of this market move in 48 hours when the right house appears, and they still negotiate. The neighborhood is not falling apart. Its median is being computed on a mix that shifted.

Trinidad $590K, -5.6% YoY, +2.7% MoM. DOM 44, L2S 95.3%. 62 trailing sales. Three straight weeks of repair on a sample big enough to trust: -18.8%, -8.1%, now -5.6%. The median has climbed off the floor far enough to tie Brightwood, which means the cheapest tracked neighborhood in DC is now a two-way race. Terms are firming too: list-to-sale rose to 95.3% from 94.7%. Still 44 days. Still the most negotiable big-sample market in the city. Last week this column said the cautionary tale was changing. It keeps changing, in the same direction.

Dupont Circle $1.80M, +6.8% YoY, +1.1% MoM. DOM 15, L2S 97.8%. 59 trailing sales. Doubled its annual gain in a week on a deep sample, and nobody is talking about it because Dupont never crashed loudly enough to stage a comeback. Fifteen days to contract at nearly 98% of ask, on 59 sales, at a $1.80M median. While Kalorama Heights sits at -15.0% and 53 days one neighborhood over, Dupont is quietly the strongest large-sample luxury print in the city. The difference is turnover: Dupont's stock trades often enough to reprice continuously. Markets that reprice continuously do not build corrections. They meter them out.

Market Snapshot: July 20, 2026

Neighborhood	Median Price	MoM	DOM	$/sqft	L2S	YoY	Sales
Kalorama Heights	$2.58M	-0.6%	53	$713	94.3%	-15.0%	26
Georgetown	$1.85M	—	14	$1022	98.0%	-6.3%	124
Dupont Circle	$1.80M	+1.1%	15	$760	97.8%	+6.8%	59
Woodley Park	$1.66M	—	13	$812	100.0%	-22.5%	15
Kalorama Triangle	$1.65M	-3.5%	61	$752	94.3%	-6.8%	7
N Cleveland Park	$1.53M	-1.0%	10	$767	98.8%	+7.7%	14
Mount Pleasant	$1.46M	-0.8%	5	$697	100.0%	-1.0%	54
Burleith-Hillandale	$1.45M	—	8	$942	98.8%	-21.6%	35
Logan Circle	$1.45M	—	22	$777	97.5%	-12.7%	42
Cathedral Heights	$1.36M	—	29	$715	96.0%	-8.1%	17
Foxhall Village	$1.33M	—	6	$802	100.0%	-4.9%	19
Cleveland Park	$1.28M	-5.2%	17	$747	96.4%	-13.9%	12
Glover Park	$1.25M	—	11	$862	98.1%	-4.2%	36
Friendship Heights	$1.23M	—	7	$716	100.0%	+20.0%	11
Adams Morgan	$1.22M	+10.1%	21	$690	96.3%	+4.0%	12
Chevy Chase	$1.22M	+1.1%	8	$686	98.8%	+5.6%	20
Shaw	$1.20M	+1.3%	24	$667	99.2%	+9.6%	55
Capitol Hill	$1.09M	—	9	$714	98.7%	-3.3%	320
Navy Yard	$1.08M	—	25	$575	98.3%	-9.9%	8
American Univ Park **	$1.06M	—	7	$797	100.0%	-7.4%	5
16th St Heights	$1.01M	-0.1%	20	$539	97.2%	-4.3%	37
U Street	$997K	+0.3%	20	$708	97.9%	-16.2%	48
Hill East	$977K	-1.2%	13	$691	98.7%	+14.9%	46
Bloomingdale	$959K	-3.1%	29	$560	98.4%	-12.4%	43
Foggy Bottom **	$920K	—	54	$828	95.8%	-6.1%	5
Southwest Waterfront	$901K	-9.5%	20	$493	99.5%	-16.2%	28
LeDroit Park	$883K	—	27	$567	98.2%	-7.0%	23
Near NE / NoMa / H St	$875K	+0.4%	17	$594	97.5%	-6.9%	93
Columbia Heights	$860K	—	13	$546	97.7%	-10.9%	92
Petworth	$799K	—	27	$526	96.5%	-6.5%	145
Truxton Circle	$780K	—	41	$483	93.8%	+1.3%	31
Eckington	$730K	—	34	$500	96.9%	+7.0%	63
Park View	$725K	—	39	$508	96.9%	-7.9%	50
Brightwood Park	$685K	-0.4%	33	$514	97.4%	+8.7%	85
Kingman Park	$625K	—	26	$564	98.2%	-3.8%	67
Wakefield	$619K	—	18	$419	100.0%	+1.6%	14
Brookland	$613K	+0.5%	23	$487	98.6%	+2.2%	97
Brightwood	$590K	-1.7%	31	$445	94.5%	-6.3%	86
Trinidad	$590K	+2.7%	44	$405	95.3%	-5.6%	62
Lanier Heights *	$1.49M	-7.0%	15	$686	98.6%	-8.5%	4
Crestwood *	$1.28M	—	5	$524	100.0%	-9.2%	2
Forest Hills *	$1.23M	—	8	$751	98.9%	-12.1%	2
West End *	$1.10M	—	11	$795	95.7%	+67.9%	3
Mt Vernon Sq *	$855K	-12.5%	28	$476	98.3%	-44.4%	3

Source: BrightMLS via Compass, closed row home sales trailing 12 months as of 7/20/2026. MoM = change from 7/13/2026. Structure type filter: Interior Row/Townhouse, End of Row/Townhouse, Twin/Semi-Detached only. * Small sample (n<5): figures directional only. ** n=5: small sample.

Notable Sales

3302 Cleveland Ave NW (Cleveland Park): $3,950,000. 2 days on market. 5BR, 5,020 sqft. The week's top sale moved in two days and still closed $300,000 under its $4.25M ask, at 92.9%. That is the high end's new etiquette: speed and discipline at the same time. Buyers at this tier are not hesitating when the right house surfaces, and they are not overpaying for the privilege either. Sellers reading two-day contracts as proof of pricing power should read the ratio column first.

3533 R St NW (Burleith): $1,750,000. 6 days on market. 4BR, 2,395 sqft. Sold at 106.1% of a $1,649,000 list, $101,000 over ask, in six days. Burleith's annual column reads -21.6%, among the worst in the city, and has for months. Then a four-bedroom on R Street starts a bidding war. The neighborhood prints 8-day medians and 98.8% of ask on 35 sales; the YoY number is an artifact of which houses happened to close in the window. If you own in Burleith and the annual percentage has you nervous about listing, this sale is the counterargument.

634 Irving St NW (LeDroit Park): $470,000. 26 days on market. 3BR, 1,956 sqft. Sold at 78.3% of its $600,000 original list, a $130,000 concession. LeDroit Park clears 98.2% of ask when the opening number matches the comps. This listing opened $130,000 above what the market would carry, and the market did not negotiate politely; it repriced the listing for the seller. Twenty-six days is close to the neighborhood's 27-day median, which makes the arithmetic clean: the time cost was normal, the pricing cost was not.

Bottom Line

The annual column and the street disagreed all over the map this week. Burleith reads -21.6% and produced a $101,000 bidding war. Cleveland Park nearly tripled its decline while hosting the city's biggest sale in two days. Southwest Waterfront fell 9.5% on paper while sellers conceded half a point of ask. Adams Morgan flipped to +4.0% while its buyers kept negotiating at 96.3%. The pattern underneath: recoveries and corrections both arrive comps-first, terms-second, and the percentage column is the last thing to know. A median tells you what sold. It does not tell you what your house is worth. This week, on both sides of the park, that difference was six figures.