Glover Park

Quick Answer

Glover Park is a residential neighborhood in Northwest DC, about half a mile north of Georgetown. Its row houses are brick, built mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. Glover-Archbold Park runs along the western edge. Correctly priced houses go under contract in days.

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.

Glover Park row houses change hands rarely: 28 sold in the last twelve months, out of roughly 820 single-family row houses. A correctly priced house tends to go under contract within days. The median is 8 days.

Glover Park and Georgetown are often compared. The median sale here is $1.3M, against $1.9M in Georgetown. The houses differ: Glover Park's are nearly all brick from 1901 to 1939, on lots of about 1,700 square feet.

Glover Park row houses look alike because they nearly are.

DC lists about 880 row houses in Glover Park. About 820 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 68 are recorded as converted to two units. Nine in ten went up between 1901 and 1939, more than half of those in the 1930s. Nearly all are brick. Only about one in thirty rises three stories. The median lot is about 1,700 square feet, and the typical house has about 2,100 square feet in total. Nearly every one has a basement, and more than four in five have finished it. About one in three has four bedrooms or more.

When the shell is this uniform, the price moves on what is inside it. A finished lower level and a fourth bedroom separate two houses that share a wall.

Here is what I do with that. I compare a Glover Park house with Glover Park sales of the same size first. Then I adjust for the basement and the bedroom count before anything else. I ask the seller in writing what work was done to the lower level, and when.

In a row of near twins, the inside sets the price.

From the Record

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  Glover Park is named for Charles Carroll Glover, president of Riggs Bank, who had bought much of the land two decades before it was built on. The earliest advertisements to use the name Glover Park ran in 1926.

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  Most of the row houses went up in the 1920s and 1930s. Hall Place and W Place trace to Phillip and Mary Ann Hall's subdivision of 1903.

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  Glover and Anne Archbold donated the land for Glover-Archbold Park in 1924. A planned Whitehaven Parkway was never built, and its right-of-way became Whitehaven Park.