North of $700: The Highest Prices Per Square Foot in DC

• May 15, 2017

by UrbanTurf Staff

A Georgetown listing that recently sold for $1,175 a square foot.

The neighborhoods in DC with the highest real estate prices per square foot in 2017 are the areas that one might expect.

Leading the way with a price per square foot metric of $842 is Georgetown. A distant second is Woodley Park at $765 a square foot, then followed by Logan Circle ($751) and West End ($742). These three neighborhoods have a series of very high-end new condo projects to thank for the notably high prices per square foot.

As UrbanTurf has written previously, price per square foot is one of those tricky measures 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.” However, there is no exact science when it comes to measuring square footage, something that UrbanTurf commenter skidrowedc pointed out a couple years ago.

“Price per square foot has value as a general statistical indicator, tracking movements at neighborhood and regional scales. But overemphasis on price per square foot, combined with no legal standard for how to calculate square footage, creates an incentive to cheat the footage upward. Moreover, at the scale of an individual condo or house, it’s as much about how well the square footage is laid out than the actual quantity of square feet.”

The advertised and legal subdivision data for this article was provided by RealEstate Business Intelligence.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/north_of_700_the_highest_prices_per_square_foot_in_dc/12572