West End

Quick Answer

West End sits between Georgetown and Dupont Circle, bounded by K Street, Rock Creek and New Hampshire Avenue. DC lists about 20 row houses here: 14 single-family and 6 recorded as two units. Hotels, offices and condo buildings make up the rest. A row house here is priced against houses in the neighborhoods around it.

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.

Three single-family row houses sold in West End in the last two years, at a median of $1.1M. Three sales is too few for that median to describe the neighborhood. It describes those three houses.

For a row house, the useful comparisons are across Rock Creek and across New Hampshire Avenue. The median row house sale is $1.9M in Georgetown and $920K in Foggy Bottom.

The row houses that remain are mostly on 22nd, 23rd and 24th Streets and on L Street. Redevelopment has continued around them: the Westlight condominium and the new West End library opened at 23rd and L in 2017.

West End has about twenty row houses, and in a typical year one or two of them sell.

DC lists about 20 row houses in West End, nearly all on 22nd, 23rd and 24th Streets. About 14 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 6 are recorded as converted to two units. Six of the fourteen are recorded as built in 1900 or earlier. Five went up between 1901 and 1939. Three came later. All are brick. The typical house has about 1,850 square feet in total on a lot of about 1,100. Five rise three stories or more. Eight have a basement.

Three single-family houses sold here in the last two years. That median describes whichever houses happened to sell. A three-story house from the 1890s and a 1980s infill house can sit a block apart and share nothing else.

Here is what I do with that. I price a West End house against Foggy Bottom and Georgetown sales that match it on era, size and floor count. Then I check it against the West End sales. I ask the seller in writing what is original, what was rebuilt and when, and how the lower level is used.

When the neighborhood cannot supply the comps, the house has to be its own evidence.

From the Record

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  West End is named for its place in the L'Enfant Plan: it was the westernmost part of the original city of Washington, before Georgetown was annexed. In the 19th century it was a neighborhood of brick Victorian row houses and warehouses.

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  In 1972 the city's Office of Planning and Management published a renewal plan called "New Town for the West End." It set out to rebuild the area as a "new intown community." The hotels, offices and condominium buildings that followed grew out of that plan.

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  The former Columbia Hospital for Women at 2425 L Street NW closed in 2002 and reopened as the Columbia Residences condominium, with a Trader Joe's that opened in 2006. In 2017 the rebuilt West End library opened at 23rd and L Streets, beneath the Westlight condominium.