Home Price Watch: Forest Hills, A Tale of Two Neighborhoods

• November 17, 2014

by Lark Turner

A home for sale in Forest Hills.

In this week’s edition of Home Price Watch, we’re in Forest Hills. UrbanTurf looked at the neighborhood using segmented data from RealEstate Business Intelligence (RBI), which offered a snapshot of the market, comparing January-October 2013 to the same period in 2014.

The neighborhood is bounded by Connecticut Avenue to the West, Rock Creek Park to the east, roughly Van Ness Street to the south and Broad Branch Road and 36th Street to the north.

Though the neighborhood is full of large, multimillion-dollar homes, data from Forest Hills is based mostly on sales of condos and co-ops. There have been 78 home sales in the neighborhood this year, of which 61 were either condos or co-ops. The average sales price for these units was $388,433 in 2013 and dropped about 4 percent in 2014 to $372,555. (UrbanTurf typically uses median sales price metrics, but for the finer-grained data only average sales prices are available.)

Sales of homes were a bit more complex. The most data comes from detached houses with four or more bedrooms, where 13 homes have sold this year. For these homes, the average sold price ticked up a very slight 0.63 percent, from $1,611,635 to $1,621,722.

Click to enlarge.

Here are some more takeaways from the neighborhood as a whole:

• The average days-on-market dropped 18 percent in 2014, from 56 to 46 days.
• 53 of the home sales were conventional, but there were also 22 cash sales.
• Sales dollar volume is down 24.5 percent, a trend we’ve seen throughout the D.C. area in the aftermath of last year’s particularly hot market.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/home_price_watch_forest_hills_where_condo_prices_dropped_4_percent/9226