Petworth

Quick Answer

Petworth has about 3,500 row houses, more than any other neighborhood on the Georgia Avenue corridor. Nine in ten were built in the 1910s and 1920s, nearly all of brick. The record places them between 14th Street and North Capitol Street, from Spring Road and Rock Creek Church Road north to Emerson Street. The Georgia Ave-Petworth Metro, on the Green and Yellow Lines, sits at the southwest corner. The median sale is $789K.

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.

The current median is $789K, at a median of 25 days on market and 96.8% of list price. That pace leaves time to see a house twice. It is a market with depth, not a shortage. Buyers have time to evaluate; sellers need the right price from day one.

Petworth's median is $789K at $512 a square foot. Columbia Heights is at $875K and $533. Park View is at $750K and $500. Petworth has more than twice the row houses of either, so a single block tells you more than the neighborhood figure.

The median house sells in 25 days. A house priced high shows it in its days on market within weeks.

Petworth is the most uniform row house neighborhood I work in, and that is its advantage.

The public record lists about 3,500 row houses in Petworth. About 3,400 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 160 are recorded as converted to two units. Nearly all of them went up between 1900 and 1939. Six in ten were built in the 1920s alone, and another third in the 1910s. Almost none rise past two stories. Every one of them has a basement, and three in four have finished it. The median lot is about 1,875 square feet, and the typical house has about 2,200 square feet in total. More than a third have four bedrooms or more.

With that much sameness, the differences are easy to see and easy to price. The basement is the big one: finished, legal as a separate unit, or still a cellar. After that come the bedroom count, the rear porch and whether the kitchen and baths were redone.

Here is what I do with that. In Petworth I compare a house to its near-twins on the same and nearby blocks, then adjust for the basement first. A finished basement with its own entrance and the paperwork to rent it is a different asset from a finished rec room. I ask for the certificate of occupancy before I count any rental income.

When every house started the same, the basement decides the price.

From the Record

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  Petworth takes its name from John Tayloe III's country estate. His heirs sold it to developers in 1887, and in January 1889 the 387-acre Petworth subdivision, the Tayloe estate joined to the Marshall Brown estate, was recorded. It was the first subdivision laid out under the 1888 Subdivision Act, which required new streets to extend the L'Enfant Plan, with circles and diagonal avenues to match.

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  Building stalled after the Panic of 1893 and picked up after a streetcar line was extended up Georgia Avenue in the early 1900s. The city's housing shortage of the 1920s set off the main surge, and by the 1930s Petworth was built out almost to capacity. The record dates six in ten of today's row houses to the 1920s and a third to the 1910s.

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  Grant Circle's first house went up in 1913 and 1914, and the circle and its triangle parks were graded and landscaped as the blocks around them filled. The Grant Circle Historic District was listed on the National Register in 2015. The Metro Green Line runs directly under the circle.

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  The Petworth Neighborhood Library opened in 1939 at Georgia Avenue, Kansas Avenue and Upshur Street.

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  The Georgia Ave-Petworth Metro station opened on September 18, 1999, as part of the Green Line extension from U Street to Fort Totten.