District of Columbia Housing Monitor

The data presented in this report are supplemented by data available on the NeighborhoodInfo DC Web site, www.NeighborhoodInfoDC.org/housing.

Key findings from this report:

• The District of Columbia’s home sales market reached new heights in 2005. Compared with 10 years earlier, inflation-adjusted sales prices were up by more than 200 percent.
• By the end of 2005, the city’s sales market showed signs of cooling, but strong price gains continued. Compared with the same period a year earlier, sales volume in the fourth quarter of 2005 fell by 18 percent for single-family homes and 31 percent for condominiums. Prices, however, continued their robust increases, with after-inflation gains of 17 percent for single-family units and 10 percent for condominiums. These gains were off somewhat from this decade’s average annual real increases of 19 percent.
• Price growth leadership in the city is shifting to the east. Wards 7 and 8 experienced the most rapid price increases in the past year; prices in Ward 3 started to level off. In Ivy City, Near Southeast, and neighborhoods east of the Anacostia, prices appear to be taking off, while the Capitol Hill and Howard University areas appear to be cooling off.
• The role of investors and second-home buyers has increased, particularly in the condominium market. Owner-occupants accounted for only 66 percent of D.C. condominium buyers in 2005, down from 80 percent just one year earlier.
• Home building in the District of Columbia reached a 40-year high in 2005 and continues to accelerate. Building permits for 2,860 new, privately owned housing units were issued in 2005, an increase of almost 50 percent over 2004 levels and the largest number since 1966. In the first three months of 2006, 1,327 permits were issued, up 135 percent from the same quarter last year. Construction of multifamily housing has accelerated especially sharply over the past eight years.
• The city’s stock of condominium units has mushroomed in the past four years. Since 2001, the D.C. condominium stock has grown by 7,001 units, or 23.6 percent, and has accounted for essentially all of the growth in the city’s supply of ownership housing. Condominiums now account for 26.4 percent of the city’s ownership units, up four percentage points in just four years.
• Thousands of the District of Columbia’s federally assisted housing units are at risk of loss. Almost half of the city’s 10,561 project-based Section 8 and other federally assisted multifamily housing units are at risk of expiring within the next year; 842 units expired in 2005.

  Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).