Market Watch: Logan Circle

• October 19th 2010

by UrbanTurf Staff

In a new series debuting today called Market Watch, UrbanTurf will take a close look at how housing markets in specific DC neighborhoods have fared over the last six years. For the first article, we look at the market in Logan Circle from 2004 to 2010.

The days when Logan Circle was a neighborhood that DC residents avoided at all costs are a distant memory. Now the area is home to high-end one-name restaurants like Estadio and Posto, expensive furniture stores, and beautifully restored row houses that rarely fetch less than $1 million.

However, when looking at the average sales prices for properties in the neighborhood over the last six years, the conclusion is somewhat surprising: it is evident that there has been steady appreciation, but not the skyrocketing increase that many might expect. Below are two charts that illustrate the ups and downs that prices have experienced over the last six years and the varying increase in average sales price for different property types.

“Real estate hasn’t appreciated as much as local owners would have hoped since 2004 and 2005,” Lindsay Reishman of Lindsay Reishman Real Estate told UrbanTurf. “The area has come a long way during this time, but the macro economic influences have kept prices from appreciating further. However, Logan Circle is now a neighborhood akin to Dupont, where properties hold their value well and remain relatively insulated from market downturns.”

So far, 183 properties under $1 million have sold in Logan Circle in 2010 compared to just 16 over $1 million. The sales pace for the neighborhood is a bit slower for sub-million dolar properties than at this point last year when 225 properties had sold; for properties above $1 million it is ahead of last year’s pace of 15.

Currently, the average number of days that listings spend on the market is 53, but homes seem to be selling much faster than that. In the past two months, Reishman’s team has gotten full price on a two-bedroom unit at 1750 16th Street NW two days after the property was listed (at $665 a square foot). They got above the asking price for this two-bedroom unit on Corcoran Street in just six days. A two-bedroom on Logan Circle that we featured for This Week’s Find was on the market for just three days in early September before we received word that the listing had received multiple offers. It was under contract the next day.

“When I analyze price for clients, I tend to find that a property in Logan is worth very close to what it was worth five years ago,” Reishman told UrbanTurf. “And while I don’t expect home prices in the neighborhood to change substantially in the next year, I’m confident that in three years properties in the area will be worth more than they are worth today.”

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* Methodology. For the purpose of this article, the boundaries of Logan Circle are defined as 16th Street to the west, S Street to the north, 10th Street to the east and M Street to the south. Average sales data was pulled from the Multiple Listing Service for the area within these boundaries.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/market_watch_logan_circle/2579.