Everybody that has bought a home knows. The spring is the busiest and most competitive time of the year. The months of April, May, and June generally make up roughly 40% of all home sales for the year. It’s also generally a sellers market as the demand is high, supply is tight, and prices take notice. In April 2016, DC area homes reached the highest level for the month of April since 2007. When it comes to D.C. proper, there were 779 total sales for the month of April. This is a significant increase as there were 919 combined sales for the months of January and February. This month the Ninja team broke the sales by bedroom type, neighborhoods with the most sales, top over/ask, and top/lowest average total square feet.
April 2016 D.C. Home Sales by Bedroom and Ward.
This first ward map represents all of the April 2016 D.C. home sales colored by number of bedrooms. If you drag your mouse over the icon, you can see additional information like closing price, year built, total square feet, closing date, and more. You can see that the one bedroom sales are concentrated in the central downtown area and the sizes get larger as you move out (seemingly more density/real estate). The same goes for the larger homes such as the 4 bedrooms which seem to have had the most sales in Wards 4 and 5. When it comes to extra bedrooms, it’s far more expensive between a 1 and 2 bedroom than a 2 bedroom and 3 bedroom. It costs roughly $210,000 more for a 2 bedroom in comparison to a 1 bedroom while a 3 bedroom in comparison to a 2 bedroom only costs $82,526 more.
Top 5 D.C. Neighborhoods with Most Home Sales in April 2016.
In the chart above, the price on each bar represents the average closing price of each sale in the neighborhood. If you drag your mouse over each bar, you can see additional information like average cost per square foot, average days on the market, and average difference between list and close price. Columbia Heights dominated the month of April. It was both the number 1 neighborhood with most number of properties sold and a greater total number of sales than the combined totals of Stanton Park and Near North East. Columbia Heights and Dupont Circle continue to have the highest number of properties sold in a month period as both neighborhoods appeared in the top 5 for January and February Ninja Reports as well. Next we look at over/under asking price.
Top 10 Neighborhoods Over and Under Asking Price:
Here we can see an interesting set of neighborhoods that make up the total “great deals” (or overpriced homes) and “most competitive neighborhoods” (or simply put homes that are under priced). While many of DC’s most expensive neighborhoods such as AU Park, Cleveland Park, and Barnaby Woods make up the over-ask side of the list, its important to note that most of them only have a few sales in the month of April inflating the “neighborhood average”. An obvious example of this type of “sample size confusion” is Fairlawn which managed to crack the top over-ask neighborhoods for the first time this year with only 2 sales. By comparison, two neighborhoods that showed both a large sample and interesting trends were Logan Circle/Shaw and Georgetown. Logan saw whopping 46 properties going for an average of $25,000 over/ask whereas Georgetown is most definitely overpriced these days with 21 homes going for an average of $61,000 under asking price.
Top 10 Neighborhoods with Highest and Lowest Average Price Per Square Foot and Lowest 10 Average Price Per Sq Ft.
Finally we bring ourselves to every realtors favorite: average cost per square foot! This normalized metric helps to keep size relative to price in check when looking at the data. Drag your mouse over each box to see more information like number of sales, average square foot, average year built, average close price, and average list price. Here we find that West End has the highest cost per square foot by far towering over Georgetown by almost 30% with a decent number of homes sold (8). Georgetown is by far the most expensive with the largest sample size at $695/sqft and 24 homes sold. In looking at the least expensive homes, Deanwood is the only significant area with a decent sample size with an average price of $176/sqft and 10 homes sold.
Ninja Notes
-For the real estate data, we used MRIS data which real estate agent Valerie Green kindly provided us.
-For neighborhood data, we used the D.C. Office of Planning’s open data neighborhood cluster data set.
-As we noted within the text of some sections, its important to look at the total number of properties sold in each Neighborhood as that can greatly influence the average price that makes up our rankings.