Logan Circle

Quick Answer

Logan Circle is about 360 row houses around the park where 13th and P Streets meet Vermont and Rhode Island Avenues. Four in five are recorded as built in 1900 or earlier. The neighborhood is built out. Sellers have closed at 98% of list. 14th Street runs through the west side and carries the restaurants and shops.

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.

Sellers here have closed at 98% of list, and the median house went under contract in 20 days.

Georgetown is the other 19th-century row house neighborhood to weigh against Logan Circle. The median there is $1.9M, against $1.4M here. Logan Circle has two Metro stations within walking distance. Georgetown has none.

Supply here does not grow. The neighborhood is built out, and one row house in a hundred in the record dates from 2000 or later. Most of the rest stand in historic districts that limit what can change.

Logan Circle row houses are older and bigger than their neighbors, and there are not many of them for sale at once.

In the last ten years, about 250 fee simple row houses in Logan Circle changed hands, roughly two a month. Two-thirds were built before 1900, half of them in the 1880s and 1890s. The typical one had about 2,800 square feet of living space. More than half rise three stories or more above the ground, and six in ten have four bedrooms or more.

In the public record, Logan Circle has about 360 row houses, and more than half of them, about 200, are recorded as converted to two units. Two in three of those rise three stories or more.

Size and age explain most of the price. A house this big and this old is not compared against twenty others. At two sales a month across the whole neighborhood, a buyer is usually weighing one house against two or three. The median sale here is $1.4M.

Age shows up in a second way. A house built in the 1880s has been rebuilt inside at least once. The quality of that work is where two similar houses part ways. Look at the wiring, the plumbing, the roof and what holds up the floors.

Here is what I do with that. With so few comparable sales, I pick comps that match the house, not the circle. Same era, same size and the same number of floors, even a few blocks out. Then I look hard at what each renovation did to the systems, not only the finishes.

When there are only a few houses to compare, the comparison sets the price. Choose it carefully.

From the Record

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  Originally named Iowa Circle. Congress renamed it Logan Circle in 1930 in honor of General John A. Logan, a Civil War commander and U.S. Senator who lived at 4 Logan Circle. His 1868 order created Decoration Day, now Memorial Day.

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  The equestrian statue of General Logan at the center of the circle was sculpted by Franklin Simmons with a base designed by Richard Morris Hunt. It was dedicated on April 9, 1901 by President William McKinley.

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  Most of the row houses around the circle went up between 1875 and 1900. The Logan Circle Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1972, covers the circle and eight blocks around it: about 135 houses in late Victorian and Richardsonian Romanesque styles.

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  Logan Circle is the only circle park in Washington that keeps the residential character L'Enfant planned for it.