Real Estate

In real life, hipchickindc is actually the not-so-hip Suzanne Des Marais, an associate broker with Urban Pace. Voted one of the best real estate agents in DC by the Washington City Paper Readers’ Choice Poll in 2009, Suzanne is currently Chair of the DC Public Policy Committee for the Greater Capital Area Association of REALTORS® and is President Elect of the Washington, DC Association of REALTORS®. She lives (and sells a lot of houses) in Bloomingdale, but works all over DC, with everyone from first time buyers to highly regarded developers.

Unless specifically noted, neither she nor the company that she is affiliated with represented any of the parties or were directly involved in the transaction reported below. Unless otherwise noted, the source of information is Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS), which is the local multiple listing system. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

Featured Property: 516 Buchanan St NW

Original List Price: $525,000.

List Price at Contract: $525,000.

List Date: 03/17/2010

Days on Market: 5

Settled Sales Price: $546,500.

Settlement Date: 04/16/2010

Seller Subsidy: $0.

Bank Owned?: No

Type Of Financing: Conventional

Original GDoN is: here.

Listing is: here. Virtual tour is here.

Last week, you may have noticed an UrbanTurf post about The Neighborhoods of 2015, which considered the up and coming ‘hoods expected to be hot in a few years. The Prince of Petworth, PoP contributor Kevin Wood, and myself were included among those asked to comment. Notably, Petworth was absent from the list; an omission somewhat explained by this Good Deal or Not Revisited (GDoN-R).

Ed. Note: I did not pick Petworth for the UrbanTurf article because the criteria I was given also made it clear that Petworth was already a hot neighborhood! (I was shocked to see Mt. Pleasant listed…)

Quite simply, once a house can be a Good Deal or Not (GDoN) post and be priced over half a million dollars (after having sold less than five months prior for sub-$200,000), and be declared a good deal by commenters, then perhaps that neighborhood is already past “up and coming”. Not to mention that it was on the market for a whopping total of five days and sold over twenty thousand dollars above list…for a house on a three syllable street!

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that the first house on Capitol Hill to sell over a million dollars sold in 2001. A comparable milestone for Petworth was the first house to sell over half a million dollars, which came to fruition in 2004. The market peak of 2005 saw a total of 28 sales of fee simple properties in Petworth over $500,000., followed by the same total in 2007. The number of $500,000.+ sales in Petworth slowed down to 16 in 2007, followed by a disappointing total of 3 in 2008. In all of 2009, only 6 Petworth properties sold over the $500k mark. Almost at the halfway point for the year, there have already been 5 settled sales over half a million dollars. Petworth isn’t necessarily in line to compete with top of the Boom price activity yet, however, things are definitely moving along.

Of course, price is not the only measure of the health of a sub-market. Back in 2002, Petworth saw 192 fee simple properties change ownership hands. By 2003, that number progressed to 230, to a peak in 2004 at 268 transactions. Number of transactions progressively slid back to lows of 134 and 139 in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Foreclosure sales followed by re-sales of the same (but renovated) properties bumped the numbers to 201 transactions in 2009. So far, for the first half of 2010, there have been 109 settled fee simple sales, which is setting a nice, steady pace.