Every DC question I get asked.
Answer first, then the reason.

Competitive, not chaotic. Well-priced homes in sought-after neighborhoods still draw multiple offers and move fast. The difference from the peak years: more room on outliers, more leverage on anything that has sat. Less competitive than 2021 does not mean uncompetitive. Show up with pre-approval in hand and your number settled before you fall for the kitchen, and you can win without losing your mind.

Less than you think. The floor is 3% on a conventional loan, 3.5% on FHA, zero on VA or USDA if you qualify. On a $1M home, 3% is $30,000. The down payment is one line item, though. Add closing costs at roughly 2% to 4% in DC, plus cash reserves. DC's first-time buyer program, HPAP, can cover down payment and closing costs for buyers who qualify. What stops a purchase is rarely the down payment. It is not knowing the full number.

The ones that were underestimated at the right moment. Capitol Hill paid off for buyers in the late 2000s. Bloomingdale, Eckington and H Street rewarded the people who stopped worrying about the commute. Petworth, Brookland and Deanwood followed. The pattern repeats: next to something people already love, walkability improving rather than finished, and prices that have not fully caught up. The east side of the city, where infrastructure is catching up to demand, is where I watch now. The surer path to appreciation is a good asset at a fair price, not a bet on the hottest zip code.

A condo is real property: a deed, a unit, the air inside your walls. A co-op is shares in a corporation that owns the building, plus a lease on your unit. The difference shows up at the mortgage. Most lenders do not finance co-ops the way they finance condos, which narrows your financing when you buy and your buyer pool when you sell. Co-op boards also approve purchasers, and sometimes renovations, subletting and pets. Some owners value that control. Know what you are agreeing to before the board asks for three years of tax returns and an interview.

Plan for 30 days, prepare for 45. That is the financed norm in DC. Cash can close in 7 to 14 days. What stretches a timeline is almost always financing. Appraisal delays. Underwriting backlogs. A title issue nobody caught. A seller who has to close on their next home first. DC closes through settlement attorneys, not escrow companies, so that choice moves the timeline more than it would in other states. Hire people who have done this enough that surprises do not become emergencies.

Budget 2% to 4% of the purchase price, and lean toward 4%. The big items: DC recordation tax, 1.1% up to $400,000 and 1.45% above. Lender fees. Title insurance. Settlement attorney fees. Prepaids such as homeowners insurance and the first month of interest. On a $1M purchase, $20,000 to $40,000 on top of the down payment. First-time DC buyers may qualify for a recordation tax exemption that cuts that number meaningfully. Ask about both numbers before you tour, not at the settlement table.

Budget 7% to 9% of the sale price. On a $1M home that is $70,000 to $90,000. The items: agent commissions, which are negotiable. DC transfer tax, 1.1% up to $400,000 and 1.45% above. The seller share of recordation tax. Settlement fees and deed preparation. Any credits you give the buyer. Model your net proceeds before you list, not on the way to settlement.

It turns on one variable: how long you are staying. Under three years, the math almost never favors buying; transaction costs eat the appreciation. Five years or more, buying almost always wins here, in equity and in not asking a landlord's permission to paint. Three to five years depends on the property, the price, the rate and your discipline as a renter. Anyone who answers yes or no without those variables is selling something, including me. Bring specifics and you get a real answer.

The Home Purchase Assistance Program, HPAP. Interest-free, deferred loans plus closing cost help for income-qualifying buyers purchasing in DC. Amounts run from a few thousand dollars to over $200,000, depending on income, household size and price. DC4ME covers DC government employees and EAHP covers District employees. The catches: income and price limits, a required homebuyer education course, and a slower process than a conventional purchase. Your agent and lender need to know these programs from day one. Plenty of buyers qualify and never use them because nobody told them.

Through relationships, not platforms. Pocket listings move through agent networks, not Zillow. The buyers who see them are represented by agents embedded in the local broker community. Direct relationships with listing agents before homes hit the MLS. A sense of which owners are thinking about selling before they say so. Sometimes it is a letter to one street. Sometimes it is a call that comes because an agent brings clean, serious buyers. It is never another app.

The share of asking price a home actually sells for. 100% is at list. 105% is 5% over. 96% means the buyer negotiated 4% off. At neighborhood and price-band level, this one number tells you more about conditions than almost any other. Where homes routinely close at 103%, offering list means you probably lost. Where the ratio sits at 97%, full price with no contingencies leaves money on the table. Pricing a home or writing an offer without this data is instinct where evidence was available.

Three things you can check. A Georgetown Master of Real Estate Development, which is a development and underwriting degree, not a sales course. A decade building and running startups, where pricing and negotiation had consequences. Nearly two decades in the DC market, and 25 years of closed row house sales in the data I work from. In practice: pricing from closed sales, not instinct. A clear answer when the math says wait. The number the data gives, even when it is not the one you wanted.

Modestly, if forecasts hold. Going into 2026 the credible forecasts landed around 6% to 6.25% by year end: an improvement, not a return to the 3% and 4% of the pandemic years, which were an anomaly rather than a baseline. Waiting for the perfect rate puts you in line with everyone else who waited, at a higher price. If rates fall meaningfully, demand surges and prices follow. A buyer at 6.5% today who refinances at 5.75% in 18 months can end up ahead of one who waited and paid $40,000 more for the same house. Buy on readiness and the right property, not on a forecast.

On an $800,000 loan, the 80% loan on a $1M home, about $526 a month. At 7%, principal and interest run about $5,322. At 6%, about $4,796. That is $6,312 a year and about $189,000 over 30 years. So rate matters a great deal to the monthly number. What it does not tell you is that waiting is the right move, because prices respond to rate drops and a higher purchase price can eat the savings. Think in total cost of ownership: price, rate, taxes, insurance, and condo or HOA fees.

Lock it. For a buyer under contract on the right home, that is the conservative and almost always correct answer. Floating is a bet that rates fall before closing. If they rise, your payment rises and the budget may stop working. If they fall slightly, the savings are modest. The risk is lopsided. The exception is a buyer with real market knowledge, an expensive lock, and a read on near-term policy, which is a small minority. Buying a home is already a high-stakes decision. An open rate bet on top of it rarely pays enough to justify the anxiety.

Paying upfront, in discount points, to lower your rate. One point costs 1% of the loan and cuts the rate by roughly 0.25%. On an $800,000 loan, one point is $8,000 and saves about $134 a month at current levels, so breakeven is around 60 months. Keep the loan five years and you come out ahead. A temporary buydown is different: a seller or builder credits money at closing to lower your rate for the first one to three years. It has become a negotiating tool in slower markets. Whether a buydown is worth it depends on how long you hold the loan and what else that cash could do. If the seller funds it, take it.

Three things move it: credit score, loan-to-value, and how many lenders you shop. On credit, 740 against 780 can be a quarter point or more. Pull your report early, fix errors, and open no new credit before applying. On shopping, one or two quotes is the norm and four or five is what the studies show cuts your rate. Local credit unions and community banks often beat the national lenders. A DC mortgage broker reaches dozens of lenders with one application. Multiple mortgage inquiries inside 45 days count as one on your credit, so shop without apology.

Both, depending on where and at what price. At the city level DC has been rebalancing after years of seller dominance: inventory up, days on market longer, buyers with more leverage than at any point since before the pandemic. At the block level, well-priced homes in high-demand neighborhoods still move fast with multiple offers. The buyer's market is strongest in the outer neighborhoods, above $1.5 million, and in homes that have sat because the seller is still pricing to 2022. Buying, you have leverage, but not everywhere. Selling, do not price off a neighbor's 2022 sale.

Spring, by the conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom is right about the traffic. March listings draw the most buyers, the most competitive offers and the fastest absorption in nearly every neighborhood. The contrarian read, with data behind it: late January or February can beat spring in a year when spring inventory is expected to surge. You meet the serious buyers who waited through winter with little to choose from, before the spring listings arrive. The worst months to list in DC, in almost any market, are August and December.

Longer than the sub-30-day pace of recent years. As of late 2025, the average DC home spent 45 to 65 days on market before going under contract. The spread inside that average is huge. Priced-right homes that show well still go under contract in two to three weeks. Overpriced homes and heavy projects sit 60, 90, 120 days. Days on market is one of the strongest negotiating signals there is. A seller at 70 days is in a different position from one who listed last week. Pull the number at neighborhood and price-band level, not citywide, before you write.

How long it would take to sell every listed home at the current pace with no new listings. Four to six months is balanced. Below it, sellers hold the advantage; above it, buyers. Under two months is the frenzy DC saw in 2021 and 2022. DC entered 2025 at roughly 0.92 months and climbed through the year toward a more normal range, still short of balanced. The structural reason: the Height of Buildings Act caps density, zoning is restrictive, and the land is essentially built out. That is a durable floor under values, and it is why DC rarely produces a true buyer's market.

Modestly down in the District, flat to slightly up in the most resilient suburbs, and highly variable by neighborhood and property type. The credible forecasts for 2026 called for a 1% to 2% decline in DC proper. On a $1M home that is $10,000 to $20,000: a reason neither to flee nor to panic-sell. The citywide number matters less than the product you are buying. Georgetown, Chevy Chase DC and Cleveland Park have held price through several cycles. Condos are trailing rowhouses and single-family homes, partly on fee increases and reserve concerns. The number you need is price per square foot for your product, in your geography, over the last six months.

The Height of Buildings Act caps most buildings at 130 feet on commercial streets and 90 on residential ones. It is not about Capitol views, despite the legend; it dates to early-20th-century fire safety. The effect on housing is the point. DC cannot build the towers Chicago, New York or Miami use to absorb growth. Supply is structurally capped in a way few American cities share. That gives DC values a stronger floor, because supply cannot answer demand the way it does elsewhere. Every buyer here competes for a finite, nearly fixed pool of housing. It is the single most important structural fact about DC real estate.

Yes, with conditions worth reading before you close. DC's short-term rental law requires that the unit be your primary residence. Renting it while you travel is allowed. Buying a condo to run as an Airbnb while you live elsewhere is not, and the penalties are real. On top of the law, your condo documents may restrict or ban short-term rentals outright, and many DC associations have added that language in recent years. If rental income is part of your math, read the condo docs and the DC regulations first.

Elsewhere the words are interchangeable. In DC they are not. A rowhouse is an attached home from the city's original fabric, mostly late 19th or early 20th century. Brick, party walls, a front stoop, and a facade that continues its neighbors'. It is the dominant housing type in Capitol Hill, Shaw, Columbia Heights and Petworth. A townhouse usually means newer attached construction, 1970s onward, suburban in style, often with a garage and in a planned development. The difference matters because rowhouses often carry historic preservation rules on the exterior, run narrower and deeper, and are priced as the most sought-after product in the market.

Fee simple: you own the land and the structure outright. No association, no monthly fee beyond voluntary civic dues, no shared documents governing what you do with the house. Your maintenance, your insurance, your decisions. Fee simple rowhouses are the most sought-after product in DC: Capitol Hill, Logan Circle, Shaw, Columbia Heights. The supply is fixed.

A rowhouse condo looks like the same house but has been legally subdivided under a condominium regime, usually when an owner converts a two- or three-unit building and sells the units. You own your unit and a share of the common elements, and you answer to an association, its documents and its fees. Living in one can feel identical. The legal structure is not. Review the documents and the financials before you go under contract.

Start at the roof and the rear. Most DC rowhouses have a flat or low-slope rear section, often an addition, and that is where water gets in. An inspector who works in DC's historic stock is not optional. Budget for one.

Party walls are shared and cannot be casually altered. Settlement cracks, staining or water at the party wall need a close look.

In historic districts, which cover most of Capitol Hill, Georgetown and Logan Circle, the Historic Preservation Review Board governs the exterior: additions, window replacements, facade changes. Not a reason to avoid them. A constraint to price in.

Mechanicals in pre-1950s houses mix original and updated parts. Knob-and-tube wiring, cast iron drains and galvanized supply lines are common. None is a deal-breaker. Each has a cost that belongs in your offer.

The load-bearing wall two rowhouses share. In DC it is typically owned jointly by both neighbors under common-law rules older than most of the houses. Neither owner can remove or materially alter it without the other's consent, because it is the structural boundary between two separately owned properties. Disputes usually come from water infiltration, settlement cracks, or construction that touches the shared wall. Maintenance is shared too, which is where neglect on one side becomes a fight. Have your inspector look specifically at the party wall interfaces, basement included. If you plan an addition that touches it, see a DC real estate attorney before you start, not after a dispute does.

The lower-level unit at the front of a rowhouse with its own entrance below the stoop. In DC the term covers any lower unit with a private door, whether fully below grade or garden level. A legally permitted one changes the financial profile of the house. $1,400 to $2,000 a month in rent offsets a lot of carrying cost. In Columbia Heights, Shaw and Capitol Hill, a well-configured unit is a real value driver. The variable is legality. Before counting the income, confirm with the seller and with DCRA that the unit holds a certificate of occupancy as a dwelling. An unpermitted rental is a liability, not an asset: code costs, stop-work orders, and sometimes serious fines.

The Historic Preservation Review Board has jurisdiction over the exterior. That covers most of DC's historic rowhouse neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Georgetown, Logan Circle, Shaw, Dupont Circle. In practice: window replacements must match the originals, and porch changes, facade work and additions visible from the street need a certificate of appropriateness first. Interiors, mechanical systems and anything not visible from a public way are not affected.

Designation gets read as a burden. It is closer to neighborhood-wide quality control, and a large part of why Capitol Hill and Georgetown have kept both their architecture and their values: nobody can replace a contributing rowhouse with a glass box. Before you buy with a renovation in mind: check the contributing status. Confirm whether it is individually landmarked. Talk to an architect who files with HPRB before you set a budget. Approvals are obtainable. Surprises are avoidable.

Scale. A large building has professional management, a reserve fund with a formal study, contested board elections, and a budget covering elevators, lobbies and amenities. A rowhouse condo is almost always two to four units. Governance is informal. There may be no manager. Reserves may be thin or absent. One owner who bought first may have set every norm. And because the units are structurally attached, a disagreement over water, maintenance or a capital repair is hard to settle without formal rules.

None of that makes them bad buys. It changes the diligence. Read the documents, ask for the reserve balance, and find out who the other owners are and whether the association actually functions. A funded two-unit with cooperative co-owners is a fine asset. An ungoverned one is a different purchase.

You buy the tenants' legal protections along with the building. DC's Rental Housing Act limits annual increases on covered units to CPI plus 2%, with a cap. A tenant at $1,800 moves by a small formula each year, whatever market rent is doing. Eviction protections are among the strongest in the country. Removing a tenant, even for cause, is a long legal process. Removing one to occupy or renovate the unit requires exact procedure, sometimes relocation assistance, and still takes months. Have a DC real estate attorney review every tenancy before you go under contract.

The fee is the operating budget: common-area maintenance, insurance, management, shared utilities, and the contribution to reserves. Reserves are the savings account for capital work: roof, elevator, facade. A well-funded reserve matches projected needs. An underfunded one is a special assessment waiting to happen. A special assessment is a one-time charge on every owner when the association faces a cost it cannot cover: a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands per unit. Before you offer, get two years of meeting minutes, the current reserve study, and the latest financials. Clean financials earn a premium for a reason. A thin reserve with deferred maintenance is a liability dressed as an asset.

DC charges both a recordation tax and a transfer tax. Combined, 1.1% of the price up to $400,000 and 1.45% above. On a $1M purchase that is $14,500, split between buyer and seller by custom, though the contract can allocate it differently. It is one of the higher combined rates in the mid-Atlantic, which is a large part of why DC closing costs surprise people. First-time buyers may qualify for an exemption from the recordation portion under income and price limits. It is one of the most underused benefits in DC. Ask your settlement attorney before you assume you owe the full amount.

Legally, no. Practically, yes, if the agent is actually working for you. The NAR settlement sharpened the question, and some of the skepticism is earned: there are agents who show you what you found on Zillow and write offers from a template. You do not need one of those. What an agent who earns the fee brings: pricing analysis at the block level. Off-market access. Negotiation built on real transactions. The ability to see a problem before it is an expensive one. DC adds its own layers: co-ops, condo associations, rent control, TOPA, historic preservation, settlement attorneys. The question is not whether to use an agent. It is whether the one you choose earns the representation.

Since the 2024 settlement, buyer-agent pay is negotiated in the open. Before, sellers routinely offered the buyer's agent a commission through the MLS, and buyers often never discussed what their agent was paid. The settlement ended mandatory compensation offers in the MLS and requires a signed buyer representation agreement, stating the agent's pay, before you tour. In DC, sellers can still offer buyer-agent compensation and many do, especially when attracting buyers takes every incentive. What changed for you: read the representation agreement before signing, understand the structure, and negotiate it.

Start with the sold dates. Comps older than three or four months mean little in a moving market. Then price per square foot, which compares cleaner than total price across different sizes. Then condition: a renovated house and an original one are not comps without an adjustment. A CMA estimates value by taking recent sales of similar homes and adjusting for the differences, so its quality is entirely the quality of the comp selection and the adjustments. A lazy one grabs the three nearest sales. A serious one explains why the price is what it is. The worst ones hand you a number and ask for trust.

Six questions. How many offers are you expecting, and by when? What does the seller care about most: price, terms or speed? Is there a preferred settlement date? Any offers in hand? Has the seller found their next home? What did the pre-listing inspection show? That last one matters more each year: more DC sellers inspect before listing and disclose the results, so ask for the report before you write. The motivation question is the one that goes unasked. A seller under contract on their next home with a hard close date is a different negotiation from one testing the market. Knowing which tells you how much leverage you have.

The practical ones first. How long on the market? Any price reductions? Any disclosed issues? What conveys with the sale? What are the condo fees, and when did they last rise? Then a layer down. What is the seller's timeline, and why are they moving? What work was done in the last five years, and do permits exist for it? That last one is critical in DC, where unpermitted renovations are common and can derail a sale. An open house is a tour and an intelligence exercise. Ask directly and notice which answers come carefully and which get deflected.

Legal in DC with disclosure and written consent, and a structural conflict however carefully it is handled. The seller's agent owes the seller the highest price. The buyer's agent owes the buyer the lowest. One person cannot carry both duties. In practice both sides feel served until something goes wrong, and then nobody was fighting for them. A listing agent may offer a reduced commission to take the deal dual. That discount buys your independent representation in one of the largest transactions of your life. Make that trade on purpose if you make it. Do not fall into it because you called the number on the sign.

It depends on one question: do you have a path to income that does not rest entirely on your current federal position? Strong savings, a marketable skill set, a partner with private-sector income: then buying in DC is still rational. A single-income federal household with under six months of reserves should not stretch into a mortgage that needs every paycheck this year. Uncertainty is not crisis. The DC market is not collapsing, federal workers are a minority of DC buyers, and the city's economy has diversified over two decades. What is true: the uncertainty is real, buyer hesitancy is measurable, and a stretched budget has less margin than it did three years ago. Know your number and your fallback.

No. Anyone saying so has a bad data source or an agenda. What is true: DC is recalibrating after years of seller dominance. Inventory is up. Days on market are longer. Sellers accept concessions more often. That is a market returning toward normal, not a crash. The difference between a correction and a crash is equity, and DC owners hold a lot of it. That is a floor, not a cliff. Prices are softer than peak and buyers have more leverage than at any point since before the pandemic. For a buyer, an opening. For a seller, a reason to price right on day one.

Through supply and sentiment. On supply, workers who took buyouts or lost jobs listed homes at elevated rates, and inventory rose across the metro. More supply against flat demand presses on prices, most of all where federal employment is heaviest. On sentiment, would-be buyers are pausing out of general anxiety, which weakens demand further. What the layoffs have not done is reprice DC real estate. The supply constraints have not moved: no towers, restrictive zoning, finite land. Those hold values up even as demand softens. The most exposed neighborhoods are the most federal. The most insulated run on private-sector demand: Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle.

Yes, priced right and launched well. This is no longer a market where you list 10% above the comps and wait to be found; those homes sit. Sellers who price to closed sales, prepare the house, and launch with professional photography and a plan are still transacting, often inside the first weeks. The sellers struggling are the ones pricing to peak expectations in a normalized market. The best window in a given year is before spring inventory peaks, which means late winter. After that you compete with a larger pool of listings for buyers who are cautious and have more choice than in years.

Inside the District: Capitol Hill, Anacostia, Congress Heights, and parts of Southeast. Across the metro: Northern Virginia, above all Alexandria, Arlington and outer Fairfax, and Prince George's and parts of Montgomery County in Maryland. Those areas carry more exposure to federal workforce uncertainty than neighborhoods driven by private-sector employment. That is not a reason to avoid them. It is a reason to look at local supply and demand closely rather than lean on metro averages.

Run the numbers before the feelings. The case for selling: you lock in equity at a price still well above historical DC values, you are free of a landlord's obligations, and you have capital for what comes next. The case for renting: DC's long-term rental demand is deep, from professionals, government contractors and diplomatic staff. If you have owned more than five years, your payment is probably well under market rent. That is real monthly cash flow. The complication is that landlording is a job, taken on at the moment your attention is on a career change. Sentimental attachment is not a financial strategy.