Georgetown

Quick Answer

Georgetown is a historic district on the Potomac in Northwest DC, west of Rock Creek. Its row houses run from the 1700s to the 1980s, and the district is built out. M Street and Wisconsin Avenue are the commercial streets. There is no Metro station. Correctly priced houses go under contract in about two weeks.

How We Calculate $/sqft

$/sqft is calculated on above-grade finished square footage, the standard used by DC appraisers, MLS systems, and most market participants. Properties with finished below-grade space (English basements, rental units) carry that square footage as additive value, but appraisers typically apply a discount of 50 to 75 cents on the dollar relative to above-grade space. Blending the two into a single $/sqft figure would make a home with a finished basement look cheaper than it is and obscure the real comparison. When a property has significant finished below-grade square footage, both metrics are presented in context so you understand the full picture before the appraiser does.

Georgetown closed 105 row house sales in the last 12 months at a median of $1.9M, with a median of 11 days on market. Overpriced listings sit. Correctly priced ones draw offers fast. Pricing discipline matters on both sides.

Georgetown's median is $1.9M. Burleith-Hillandale, next door to the north, sits at $1.6M, and Logan Circle at $1.4M. Weigh the river, the canal and the design review against no rail transit and corridor noise.

Supply barely grows. The neighborhood is built out, and demolition and new building go through federal design review. The last wave of new row houses came in the 1980s: about one in six dated houses is from that decade.

Georgetown's public record does not know how old most of its houses are.

DC lists about 2,200 row houses in Georgetown. About 2,100 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 100 are recorded as converted to two units. More than half carry a year built of exactly 1900, the year the city enters when it has no true date. Add the ones recorded earlier, and nearly three in four are 1900 or older. About one in ten is wood, not brick. About one in fourteen went up in the 1980s.

Size runs from one end to the other. One in five has under 1,500 square feet in total, and one in three has more than 3,000. A frame house of 1,400 square feet and a brick house of 3,500 can share a street.

Here is what I do with that. I do not compare Georgetown houses by street. I compare them by construction, size and the number of floors. I treat the year built on a listing as a claim until the deed history or the house itself backs it up.

Where the record is blank, the house is the record.

From the Record

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  Maryland's assembly chartered Georgetown as a tobacco port in 1751, 40 years before the federal city of Washington was laid out in 1791.

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  In 1871, Congress created a unified DC government that absorbed Georgetown into the District. An 1895 law completed the process, renaming Georgetown's streets to align with Washington's grid.

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  The C&O Canal operated as a commercial waterway from 1831 to 1924, transporting coal and agricultural goods between Georgetown and Cumberland, Maryland. It is now a National Historical Park.

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  A common story credits neighbors with blocking a Metro station. The historian Zachary Schrag found otherwise. A station near the river would have had to sit deep underground at great cost, and planners were building for commuters to office districts. A citizens association did publish a paper against a station in 1962, and planners told Schrag it did not shape their thinking.