Paying a Premium: The Highest Prices Per Square Foot in DC

• January 13th 2014

by Lark Turner

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Price per square foot is one of those tricky metrics in real estate. In DC, a home’s square footage consists of the above-grade finished living area. According to the DC Property Tax Division, that is “comprised of the finished areas of the main floor (kitchen, living room, dining room, etc.) and any finished areas above the main floor.” It is usually easier (and more accurate) to calculate the square footage for a condo or co-op than a single-family home, hence when you are looking at real estate listings, you are far more likely to find individual units with the square footage listed than individual houses.

Still, price per square foot ranks near the top when it comes to the criteria that buyers use to assess the value of a home to purchase. RealEstate Business Intelligence recently provided UrbanTurf with the average price per square foot statistics for DC area zip codes in 2013 and we went about finding the priciest places to live based on this data. First up, DC proper.

The ten zip codes above had the highest price per square foot sales in DC last year. The table also shows the number of sales in each zip code and the average list price of homes. The final column looks at whether home prices in the neighborhood went up or down since 2012.

The $600+ square foot club includes the usual suspects: Georgetown ($621), West End ($650) and sections of Logan Circle ($620). It is important to note that for this article we were provided with average price per square foot, rather than median, so the figures could include outliers on either end of the market that sway the average.

Stay tuned for more price per square foot analysis for Maryland and Virginia in the coming weeks.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/paying_a_premium_the_highest_prices_per_square_foot_in_dc/7987.