Report: New Condo Inventory at Lowest Level Since Before the Boom

• October 5th 2010

by Will Smith

The shortage of new condos across the DC metro area has been a theme since last spring, when condo projects started selling out and no new developments were breaking ground to replace them. In its semi-annual report on the DC-area condo market, real estate sales and marketing firm McWilliams|Ballard published some hard numbers that clearly illustrate the severity of the new condo shortage.

As of mid-2010, there were just over 4,000 unsold new condos across the area, the lowest number since before 2005. At the current sales pace, it would take a year and a half to sell those remaining units. In certain areas, the shortage is even more acute: McWilliams|Ballard reports that there is only a 1.3-year supply remaining in the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, a 2.6-month supply in Logan Circle/U Street, and a 2.1-month supply in Mount Vernon Triangle/Penn Quarter. At right are the exact inventory numbers for each city or county as they stood at midyear.

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that most of the remaining condos are concentrated in just a handful of projects, meaning that the lack of options is even worse than the inventory numbers suggest. In Alexandria, for example, the top five selling projects accounted for 100 percent of new condo sales so far this year. In Arlington, the top five selling projects accounted for almost 70 percent. Not only do new condo buyers not have many units to choose from, they don’t have many buildings to choose from either.

A final frustration is that the few units that do remain are typically the buildings’ less desirable units, either because they are big (studios and one-bedrooms are generally the most popular, while two-bedrooms and three-bedrooms take longer to sell) or they have unappealing floor plans, views, etc.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/report_new_condo_inventory_at_lowest_level_since_before_the_boom/2540.