Remember the January storm that encased the D.C. region in a layer of impenetrable snow-ice for weeks?
It’s still affecting the tempo of the typically hot spring housing market, even after the last of the snowcrete piles have — finally — melted away. That made some prospective sellers who might have tried to ready homes for March listings delay their plans, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist for the Bethesda, Maryland-based listing service Bright MLS. And then the Feb. 28 U.S. airstrikes that kicked off a conflict with Iran added longer-term uncertainty to the mix, she said.
“People may be ready to sell, people may be ready to buy, but there’s been so much uncertainty with the job market in the D.C. area, and now we’re seeing gas prices on the rise. Mortgage rates are starting to go up again,” Sturtevant said, referring to the creep northward of 6 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage that began in March. “It’s unclear what the resolution to the conflict is going to be, and when people feel uncertain, they don’t do big things.”
Bright MLS’s most recent D.C. metro area housing data, from March 5, shows closed sales down 2.2 percent from February 2025, and a drop in new listings from 4,099 to 3,574, a difference of nearly 13 percent. The median number of days listed houses spend on the market has also increased, from 11 days to 22, according to Bright MLS.
The apparent cautionary lag affects a market that otherwise presents better prospects for some buyers than did the white-hot sellers’ markets that followed the pandemic. Housing inventory, which has been historically scarce in the D.C. suburbs, is gradually increasing, up to 1.86 months of supply — a metric indicating how long it would take to sell all available homes — in February from 1.64 months in the same period last year, according to Bright MLS. The frenetic climb in housing prices has slowed, and a few regions even show prices trending downward. The days of sellers demanding buyers waive all contingencies are over, at least for now.
“The really nice properties and the really nice locations, they’re still getting multiple offers,” said Russell Brazil, president of the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors, which covers D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland. “But when we’re talking about multiple offers today, we might be talking about three to six, seven, eight. … We go back to just four or five years ago, and a hot property would get 30, 40, 50, 60 offers. So the market is still warm to hot. It’s just not that insane hot that we experienced during covid.”
The sluggish increase in inventory may be keeping some buyers seeking more choice on the sidelines. Lawrence Yun, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors, said he’d like to see inventory increases of 30 to 40 percent to rebuild to pre-covid levels. Instead, it’s closer to 4 percent year-growth.
“People want to see many homes before deciding,” he said. “If they don’t see many … that will perhaps dampen some of the enthusiasm to buy.”
Market-watchers identified two major divides in the current D.C.-area market. The first is between the Virginia and Maryland suburbs and D.C. proper, which has seen softening conditions amid a large supply of aging condominiums and federal job losses suppressing home-buying interest.
Closed sales in D.C. were down nearly 19 percent in February from the same month last year, while the median home sale price had dropped 6.2 percent in the same period, to $599,000, according to Bright MLS data. The median number of days on market for a home in D.C. is now 70, up 32 days from last year and overwhelmingly driven by stagnant condo sales, analysts said. By comparison, the median home sale price for the entire region increased 2.2 percent in the same period, to $610,000.
The next runner-up for highest median days on market was Prince George’s County, Maryland, with 40 days — an increase of 22 days from February 2025. Arlington County, Virginia, saw the most significant drop in median sales price from this February to the one before, adjusting down 7.9 percent to $692,500. But the cities and counties with the highest median prices continued to climb. Falls Church, Virginia, saw a 13 percent increase in that time period to $847,375; Fairfax City, Virginia, had a median increase of 8.3 percent to $760,000; and Loudoun County, Virginia, with some of the highest-priced Zip codes in the region, increased 1.3 percent to a median of $760,000.
According to data provided by ICE Mortgage Technology, D.C.’s condo market saw a 7.2 percent drop in median price from 2024 to 2025, from $484,000 to $450,000. That’s down from a high of $492,420 in 2020. Meanwhile, the cost of single-family residences in D.C. has generally continued to climb, from a median of $595,000 in 2016 to $800,000 last year, down from an all-time high of $833,600 in 2024.
The biggest year-over-year gain in sales was in Middleburg, in Loudoun County, with 47 houses sold, up from 29, and a median sales price of $1.05 million. The Montgomery County town of Dickerson and the Loudoun County towns of Paeonian Springs and Hamilton, all about one hour outside D.C., saw the top three largest gains in median sales prices, all reaching above $1 million.
Gunnar Blix, manager of housing market research at ICE Mortgage Technology, said the presidential administration turnover that took place in 2025, could account for some of the sales activity in these towns at the outer end of the commute radius.
Sturtevant said the condo market, which tends to attract first-time and single buyers, has been particularly subject to local shocks, which have included the loss of more than 70,000 federal jobs in 2025 through firings and resignations and the deployment of nearly 3,000 National Guard troops to patrol D.C.
“The National Guard were deployed on Aug. 18, and you can see a pullback in pending sales and showings for properties in the District of Columbia. I got the sense that people were already feeling uncertain, and now they’re a whole group of people saying, either (A) I hear there’s a lot of crime because we’re putting National Guard on the street, so I don’t want to move to D.C. Or (B) this is ridiculous. The federal government is in D.C., and I don’t want to be part of that kind of thing,” she said. “And it’s still taking some time for prospective buyers to want to take a look back at the District, particularly in the condo market.”
The second growing divide in the region, analysts say, is evidence of “K-shaped economy,” where the experiences of the wealthy diverge broadly from a struggling middle class. Some of the priciest Zip codes around D.C. got more expensive last year, even as slowing market activity overall suggested budget-conscious buyers were getting priced out.
In Alexandria, the median sales price of a single-family home increased from $940,000 in 2024 to $1.025 million last year; Arlington, the county with the region’s highest median sales prices, stayed roughly steady at $1.2 million, ICE Mortgage Technology data shows.
Fairfax County and Montgomery County had between them the five highest-priced Zip codes in 2025, according to ICE Mortgage data, with Fairfax’s McLean topping the list at $1.65 million. Great Falls, Virginia, was the runner-up at $1.59 million, followed by two Bethesda Zip codes and Chevy Chase, all above $1.35 million.
D.C.’s high-end house market also remains robust. In 2025, 1,084 single-family homes over $1 million sold, making up about 35 percent of all single-family sales. That’s down from 2024, with 1,256 homes sold over $1 million, making up 38 percent of sales.
For Casey O’Neal, an Arlington-based real estate agent who has worked in the region for nearly four decades, affordable single-family homes — those in highest demand — range from $750,000 to just over $1 million.
“If you can qualify for a million-dollar house, you might want to look at a $900,000 house and give yourself room to escalate on top of that,” O’Neal said. “Because if the house is priced at a million, it goes for $1.05 [million] … or $1.1 million. The buyer has to have the capacity and quality for that escalated number.”
While sellers in general need to be ready to make their homes turnkey ready before listing and allow for contingencies like a home inspection and appraisal, buyers in the most competitive parts of the market still have to move fast and often bid above list, O’Neal said. Recently, he said, he had a buyer make a preemptive offer on a “coming soon” home, sight unseen, in a popular school district. They bid $100,000 over the asking price and got under contract before the house hit the market.
“For them, it was a good deal,” O’Neal said.
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