Home Price Watch: The Improving Market in Anacostia

November 25, 2014

by Lark Turner

Home Price Watch: The Improving Market in Anacostia: Figure 1

Homes in Anacostia

In this week’s Home Price Watch, we head to Anacostia, where signs point to a stronger market in 2014 compared with last year. UrbanTurf looked at the neighborhood real estate market using segmented data from RealEstate Business Intelligence (RBI), which offered a snapshot of the market in the legal subdivision of Anacostia, comparing January-October 2013 to the same period in 2014.

For this article, we analyzed the historic neighborhood bounded by Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue to the north, Fort Stanton Park to the south, Good Hope Road to the east and Howard Road to the west — not the many neighborhoods east of the river often sweepingly misidentified as “Anacostia.”

Last month, Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal announced the pending opening of one of his popular restaurants in the neighborhood, which for other areas in DC has been a harbinger of rising home prices.

The neighborhood market appears to already be improving, though. Sales in Anacostia are up this year over last, increasing from 47 to 52, and the majority were all cash, indicating a high level of investor interest in the area. Meanwhile, homes are spending 22 percent less time on the market compared with last year, dropping from an average of 60 days in 2013 to 47 days this year. Nineteen of the homes sold this year were purchased in their first ten days on the market.

Click to enlarge.

Here are a few more takeaways from the data:

Home prices are slowly increasing. The median price increased 6 percent overall, from $187,000 to $198,200, with detached three bedrooms selling for an average of 28 percent more this year than last.
List prices for homes rose 13 percent, and the average sold price to original list price ratio rose from about 91 percent to 97 percent.
As a result of the increased number of sales and rising prices, the sold dollar volume rose about 30 percent, from $8,849,082 during the same time period in 2013 to $11,498,548 this year.