DC's Top 50 Properties (and What They Say About the City's Buyers)

• April 20th 2010

by Mark Wellborn

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One of the criticisms of the recent column in The Atlantic about the trouble finding a home to buy in DC was that the author was limiting her search to the city’s historically popular neighborhoods. This criticism gave us the idea to try and find out which neighborhoods DC house and condo hunters are actually looking in.

Thanks to the folks over at Redfin who sent us a spreadsheet of the most viewed DC listings from their database, we were able to get a fairly good idea of the zip codes that ranked high on buyers’ priority lists. The data consists of the 50 most popular listings in the city from the last two weeks.

Here are some notable takeaways:

• Eight of the 50 most viewed properties were in the upper Northwest neighborhoods of Chevy Chase and Barnaby Woods. Capitol Hill and Columbia Heights ranked second with five properties apiece in the top 50, Logan Circle had four and Dupont Circle had three. So, not surprisingly, exactly 50 percent of the most popular listings are in some of the most popular neighborhoods in DC.

• But a look at the top 15 listings suggests that homebuyers are not confining their search to certain sections of the city. The most viewed property overall was a studio in Columbia Heights, followed by a four-bedroom in Mount Vernon Square, and then three family-sized homes in Chevy Chase. The top 15 was rounded out by properties in Shaw, 16th Street Heights, Bloomingdale, Tenleytown and Capitol Hill.

• Not one property in the top 50 was listed for over $1 million, which is an interesting stat, but also probably says more about the demographics of the people who are using Redfin than the prevalence of luxury home buyers in the District.

• The property types of the listings in the top 50 was split almost down the middle between single-family homes and condos.

While this analysis is by no means scientific, it does offer a picture of where DC buyers are looking. And it seems that even though people still prefer the city’s more established hoods, they are not averse to searching off the beaten path.

For the full list of properties we’re basing our analysis on, take a look at the spreadsheet. (Warning: it’s a little messy.)

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/dcs_top_50_properties/1992.