There is a particular sound Washington makes in the weeks before an election. It is not the noise of the campaign — that, mercifully, plays out on television. It is the sound of a city holding its breath.

I have heard it in every cycle of a 30-year career selling houses here, and I am hearing it now. Open houses in Georgetown and Kalorama that would have drawn a queue in the spring are drawing a handful of the curious. Offers that do arrive come with long contingency periods and longer silences. Sellers ask me whether they should pull the listing until after November 3. Buyers ask whether they should wait to see who controls the House.

The honest answer to both is the same, and it is not the one either wants to hear.

A market without a bid

Begin with the number that matters most. Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed rate averaged 7.28 per cent last week, up from 7.03 per cent the week before and 6.34 per cent a year ago. It crossed 7 per cent in late September for the first time since January 2025.

I spent the early part of my career trading mortgage-backed securities, and I still read the rate sheet before the listings. A one-point move is not an abstraction. On a $1mn loan — a modest one in north-west Washington — the move from 6.34 to 7.28 per cent adds roughly $625 to the monthly payment, or about $7,500 a year. That is a private-school instalment. Buyers notice.

The local data show a market that has not broken, but has lost its nerve. Across the District the median sale price over the three months to August was $684,000, down 0.7 per cent on a year earlier, according to Redfin. Price per square foot is down nearly 3 per cent. Homes take a median 57 days to sell, a third of listings have taken a price cut, and the typical property closes about 2 per cent below its asking price.

None of this is a crash. It is something more Washingtonian: a standoff. Sellers anchored to 2022 prices will not cut; buyers with options will not stretch. Bright MLS warned last December that this would be the only part of the Mid-Atlantic where prices fell in 2026. In the District itself, so far, it has been right.

The company town votes

Every American city feels an election. Only one is employed by it.

Washington’s housing market runs on turnover — of administrations, of majorities, of the committee staff, lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who follow power around the city like weather. In most markets a midterm is background noise. Here it is a hiring and firing event.

This cycle arrives on top of a year that has already tested the city’s oldest assumption: that federal Washington is recession-proof. Roughly 100,000 jobs were lost across the region in the federal overhaul, about a fifth of them in the District, according to official figures cited in a Gallup survey published last month. Those buyers did not vanish from my pipeline because of interest rates. They vanished because their employer did.

Now layer on November 3. Forecasters and prediction markets favour the Democrats to take the House, narrowly; the Senate map is harder for them. I take no side here — my clients sit on both. But a change of control matters to housing in a practical way. A new majority means new committee chairs, new majority staff and a fresh wave of investigators, counsel and the K Street hires who shadow them. It means people moving to Washington in January, and people leaving it.

That is precisely why so many are waiting. Nobody wants to buy the house before they know which job comes with it.

Who is on the fence

The waiting is not uniform, and the differences matter.

The most cautious are the middle of the market: the government lawyer, the contractor, the two-income family in Chevy Chase or Capitol Hill whose household balance sheet depends on an agency budget. For them, waiting is rational. They are not timing the market; they are waiting to find out whether they still have a reason to live in it.

Sellers are a different story. Many locked in mortgages below 3 per cent and see no reason to give them up for a soft price. Bright MLS noted last autumn that a rising number of sellers pulled listings rather than accept low offers. Expect the same this month — and expect many of them back in the spring, all at once.

The top of the market is behaving differently again. Above $3mn, buyers are less exposed to rates and more exposed to opportunity. Well-priced houses in Georgetown and Kalorama still sell, and quickly. What does not sell at any level is the house priced for 2022.

History offers some comfort, with a caveat. The National Association of Realtors has found that Washington-area sales have tended to rise in the year after an election, and prices with them. Analysts have long documented a dip in the final month before election day, followed by a rebound once the uncertainty clears. Those studies are built mainly on presidential years; a midterm is a smaller shock. But the mechanism is the same. Postponed demand is not destroyed demand. It is stored.

The price of certainty

Which brings me back to the answer neither buyers nor sellers want.

My old trading desk taught me one thing above all: markets do not pay you for certainty. They charge you for it. The discount on offer in Washington this October exists precisely because the outcome is unknown. By the morning of November 4 some of that fog will lift — and the discount will lift with it.

For buyers with secure income, this is the most leverage they have had in years. Fewer rivals, sellers willing to talk, room to negotiate on price and terms. Rates at 7 per cent are painful, but a rate can be refinanced. A purchase price cannot.

For sellers, the logic runs the other way but lands in the same place. The quiet market is the uncrowded one. If the spring brings back every listing withdrawn this autumn, the competition for buyers will be fiercer than anything on the market today. Price correctly now, and you sell into a thin field.

Washington has always rewarded those who move while others are counting votes. The election will produce winners and losers on Capitol Hill. In the property market, the losers are usually those who waited for it to tell them what to do.

Jim Bell, a former mortgage-backed securities trader, is now a Sotheby’s International Realty executive in Washington, DC and London.

Website - American Agent London

Website:American Agent London

High-net-worth sellers and elite real estate agents frequently treat the Potomac River or Eastern Avenue as invisible borders. However, from a legal, tax, and compliance standpoint, these geographic boundaries represent massive regulatory walls.

For luxury transactions, ignoring regional legal nuances could do far more than just delay a closing. It can jeopardize multi-million dollar contracts and expose sellers to severe post-closing litigation. Navigating these differences successfully requires a proactive legal strategy rather than a reactive crisis response. Understanding the specific closing mechanics, local tax laws, and structural hurdles across the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia is essential for protecting equity and ensuring smooth settlements.

The District of Columbia: TOPA Exemptions and the Mansion Tax

One of the most common and costly traps for high-end sellers in Washington, D.C., has long involved the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). In 2018, D.C. passed critical exemptions for single-family homes; however, significant exceptions remain for long-term tenants who are elderly or disabled.

Furthermore, many luxury properties in historic neighborhoods like Georgetown, Dupont Circle, or Kalorama feature English basements, au pair suites, or detached carriage houses that are actively rented out. If a luxury property contains a separate rental unit that is not legally classified as an “accessory dwelling unit,” the property may be legally categorized as a 2-to-4 unit dwelling, meaning full TOPA rights could still apply.

The RENTAL Act recently exempted most 2-to-4 unit properties from standard TOPA rights—unless they are owned in majority by a business corporation—but the statute still requires a strict Notice of Potential Sale to be delivered to occupants. Failing to properly identify a tenant-occupied space and issue the necessary disclosures early in the transaction can stall an otherwise flawless luxury closing for months.

Beyond tenant rights, Washington, D.C., imposes a progressive transfer tax often referred to as the “Mansion Tax” on high-value properties. For properties assessed under approximately $2.558 million, the property tax rate sits at $0.85 per $100 of value. However, for high-value luxury properties crossing the $2.558 million threshold, the rate increases sharply to $1.00 per $100 for that portion of the sale price above the $2.558 million limit.

Elite real estate agents must ensure the pro-rations of these progressive figures are calculated precisely in initial net sheets. Failing to do so can lead to unpleasant, high-dollar surprises for the seller at the settlement table.

Maryland: Non-Resident Withholding, Recordation Tax, and Land Covenants

Crossing the state line into prestigious Maryland enclaves like Potomac, Bethesda, or Chevy Chase introduces an entirely different set of complex financial obligations. Because the DMV attracts a highly transient population of corporate executives, foreign diplomats, and high-ranking government officials, luxury sellers in this region are frequently relocating out of the state.

The Maryland Non-Resident Withholding law dictates that if a seller is moving or already living out of state, the title company must automatically withhold a percentage of the net sales price at the time of closing to cover potential state income taxes. It is critical to note that this percentage is levied against the net sales price, not just the capital gains profit.

For a multi-million dollar property, this withholding can instantly tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars in vital liquidity. Experienced legal counsel must be consulted early in the transaction to help eligible clients apply for an advance withholding exemption certificate from the Maryland Comptroller, a process that takes 21 days prior to settlement to clear.

Furthermore, Montgomery County, Maryland, enforces a steep, progressive state recordation tax structure that significantly impacts a luxury seller’s bottom line. The initial rate of $8.90 per $1,000 for the first $500,000 progressively increases up to a rate of $22.70 per $1,000 for amounts above $1,000,000. Since this tax is generally split between buyer and seller by local custom, it can dramatically affect both parties’ bottom lines at settlement and must be factored into early negotiations.

Finally, Maryland luxury properties often present unique title and environmental features. Expansive estates in Montgomery County may contain strict conservation easements, historic preservation covenants, or private agricultural land transfers. These restrictions can severely limit future development, dictate architectural changes, or trigger unexpected, six-figure agricultural transfer taxes at closing. Agents representing sellers must verify these complex property conditions pre-listing to ensure the estate is marketed accurately and priced to reflect any underlying legal encumbrances.

Virginia: The Recordation Rule and Strict Resale Packages

In Northern Virginia luxury markets like McLean, Great Falls, or Alexandria, the regulatory challenges shift from progressive taxes to strict statutory timelines and rigid closing mechanics. The most jarring difference for multi-jurisdictional agents and buyers is Virginia’s Recordation Requirement.

Unlike D.C. and Maryland, where a settlement is legally and financially concluded the moment the buyer and seller sign the paperwork, Virginia law explicitly prohibits the disbursement of escrow funds until the deed and related instruments have been physically or electronically recorded in the county land records.

For a high-net-worth buyer wire-transferring millions of dollars, a late-Friday afternoon settlement means the transaction may not officially fund or record until Monday morning. If the seller intends to use those immediate funds for the concurrent purchase of another luxury property, settlements must be meticulously scheduled to avoid a domino effect of delayed closings. Managing buyer expectations and coordinating moving logistics during this “dry period” is a frequent operational hurdle in Virginia luxury deals.

Virginia also enforces uncompromising, pro-consumer rules regarding Property Owners’ Association (POA) and Condominium Owners’ Association (COA) resale disclosures. Under Virginia statutory law, a buyer has a strict, non-waivable right to cancel a sales contract within a small window of days negotiated by the parties after receiving the association disclosure package, even if that package is technically incomplete.

In the luxury tier, where buyers may experience sudden second thoughts or cold feet, this statutory disclosure window is frequently weaponized as an easy, penalty-free exit strategy. Sellers and their listing agents must order these comprehensive packages prior to hitting the market and aggressively negotiate limited review periods to ensure the statutory clock runs out well before the transaction nears its closing date.

Partnering for High-Stakes Success

In the highly competitive and nuanced DMV luxury market, a standard real estate transaction can quickly evolve into a high-stakes legal puzzle depending entirely upon the jurisdiction. High-net-worth individuals and the top-producing agents who represent them cannot afford to rely on guesswork, local assumptions, or generic contract templates.

Protecting your equity, your client, and your transaction requires hyper-local legal expertise. Before drafting your next multi-jurisdictional offer or preparing a luxury estate for the market, ensure your deal is safeguarded by partnering with experienced local counsel who understands the true weight of the region’s invisible borders.

Two years ago, an American calling me about London wanted to know one thing: is it cheap right now? The dollar was strong, prime London was soft, and the arithmetic did the selling. Buy in sterling, wait, sell in sterling. A trade.

The calls I get now start somewhere else. They start with the kids. With the passport. With a sentence that usually goes something like, “We just want to have somewhere.” Nobody says the word insurance, but that is what they mean.

I traded mortgage-backed securities before I ever sold a house, so I understand a currency play when I see one. This is not that. The strong dollar opened the door. Something else is walking people through it.

The currency case is real. It is also the least interesting part.

Let’s get the numbers out of the way, because they matter. A strong dollar against a sterling that has had a rough few years, layered on top of prime central London pricing that is still below its 2014 peak in real terms, means an American buyer is looking at a discount most of them have never seen in their adult lives. Add the softer regional markets — the Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Yorkshire — and a family that would be priced out of a second home in Nantucket or Aspen can own a proper house with land in England for the same money.

That is the headline. It is also the part any decent adviser can put on a spreadsheet, and it is not why people are actually signing.

What the buyers are actually saying

Here is the pattern I see, over and over, from the East Coast and the West Coast alike.

The family is not buying a holiday house. They are buying a base. They ask about schools before they ask about square footage. They ask how long they can stay on a visitor visa, and what it takes to stay longer. They ask which solicitor, which cross-border tax adviser, which bank will open an account for them. Those are not the questions of someone planning three weeks in August.

They are the questions of someone who has decided, quietly, that having all their life in one country is a concentration risk.

I would put it this way: a decade ago, geographic diversification was something a family office did with a portfolio. Now it is something a family does with its address.

The politics, plainly

I am not going to pretend the headline of this piece is an accident.

American political division has become part of the motive, and it would be dishonest to leave it out. I hear it from clients on both sides. The ones who lean one way tell me they are exhausted and want an exit ramp if things go badly. The ones who lean the other way say the same thing about a different set of outcomes. What they share is a loss of confidence that the next ten years at home will look like the last thirty.

That is the refugee I mean. Not someone fleeing hardship. Someone hedging against uncertainty, with the means to do it properly. They are not leaving America. They are making sure they have a second place to stand.

You can call that overcautious. I call it what wealthy families have always done when the ground feels less solid: they buy land somewhere else.

Where the money is going

London is back on the list, and I say that as someone paid to know. Prime central London — Mayfair, Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea — is seeing renewed American interest after years of being priced for the Gulf and the Far East. An American buyer today is often the most credible buyer in the room.

But the country is where the strategy shows most clearly. The Cotswolds have become the default answer for the California buyer who wants something that looks like the England in their head. Herefordshire and Yorkshire are drawing the buyer who has already done the Cotswolds and wants more land for less money. These are families who intend to spend real time there, not visit.

Across the Channel the same thing is happening. Italy, Spain and Portugal — Lisbon and the Algarve especially — have become primary targets for American families building a European foothold. Ireland is the one that surprises people: Americans are now among the largest groups of overseas purchasers in both Dublin and the Irish country house market, many of them arriving from California and New York. Some of that is heritage. Most of it is the same logic as everywhere else — English-speaking, EU passport potential, a functioning legal system, and a country that feels welcoming.

What this means if you are thinking about it

Three things, from someone who now does this for a living on both sides of the Atlantic.

First, buy for the base, not the bounce. If the exchange rate is the only reason you are buying, you will be a nervous owner. Buy the house you would want to be in for a long stretch if you needed to be, and let the currency be the bonus.

Second, the structure matters more than the property. Who owns it, how you hold it, how you fund it, and what it does to your tax position on both sides — get that right before you fall in love with a drawing room. Your solicitor, your cross-border tax adviser, your lender and your immigration counsel are not an afterthought. They are the deal.

Third, decide what you are actually doing. A holiday house and a second base are different purchases with different answers. I have watched families buy the first and wish, two years later, they had bought the second.

The bigger picture

For most of my career, the traffic ran one way. Foreign money came to America because America was the safe place to keep it. That is still largely true. But for the first time, a meaningful number of American families have decided that “safe” means “not all in one place.”

The strong dollar made it affordable. The politics made it urgent. The result is a buyer who is not chasing a trade, but building an option — a family that wants to know that whatever happens at home, there is a door somewhere else with their key in it.

That is the Trump refugee. Most of them would never use the phrase. All of them know exactly what it means.

Jim Bell is Executive Vice President at Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington, DC, and a consultant to Sotheby’s International Realty UK, advising American buyers and sellers in the London and UK markets.

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District of Columbia

The District’s Office of Tax and Revenue is required by law to assess all properties annually at “market value.” In recent years, however, a significant number of properties have been over-assessed. Fortunately, the District maintains a relatively accessible appeals process, and owners are well advised to review their assessments carefully upon receipt — typically in late February — and to familiarize themselves with the procedures for contesting them. To the District’s credit, residential tax rates remain reasonable: $0.85 per $100 of assessed value, increasing to $1.00 per $100 for values exceeding $2.558 million.

A more serious concern involves the vacant property designation and the manner in which vacancy exemptions are administered. This tax period, a number of former clients received bills taxing their owner-occupied residences at the vacant rate of $5.00 per $100 of assessed value — a substantial increase over standard residential rates — without any prior notice from the District beyond the bill itself. This is despite established procedures requiring notice and an opportunity to contest such a designation, procedures the District did not follow in these instances. A related and recurring issue arises when a vacancy exemption expires: the property automatically reverts to vacant status, often affecting estate sales or newly constructed or renovated properties, until the owner arranges an inspection and the Department of Buildings formally reclassifies the property as occupied. Significant amendments to the District’s vacant and blighted property tax laws are scheduled to take effect this October under DC Law 26-41. These changes, together with a more concerted effort by the Department of Buildings to reclassify affected properties, should help mitigate these problems.

Maryland

Having resided in Montgomery County for most of my life, I can attest that, notwithstanding its considerable merits, the county’s real estate tax burden — both transactional and recurring — is substantial. Additional recordation tax tiers introduced in 2023 now impose $13,360 in recordation tax alone on a $1 million owner-occupied property (for combined transfer and recordation taxes of $28,360), and $36,060 on a $2 million property (combined taxes of $66,060). Although these taxes are typically split equally between buyer and seller (absent an agreement otherwise), each party’s share nonetheless amounts to nearly 1.45% of the purchase price at the $1 million level, over 1.5% at $2 million, and over 3.5% at $3.5 million — figures that render Montgomery County the most expensive jurisdiction in the region for higher-value transactions, and among the most expensive in the country.

It might be argued that owners of high-value property can readily absorb these costs; this argument, however, disregards the additional burden such taxes place on residential development more broadly. Property tax rates in the county range from 1.15% to 1.17%, exclusive of municipal taxes and special service charges. Further compounding the burden, the County Council voted 9-2 in May 2026 to eliminate the Income Tax Offset Credit (“ITOC”), a component of the Homestead program that had reduced Maryland taxes for owner-occupants of principal residences.

Virginia

Virginia remains, by a considerable margin, the least expensive jurisdiction in the region with respect to transaction taxes, even accounting for Northern Virginia’s Congestion Relief Fee (enacted 2013) and WMATA Capital Fee (enacted 2018). The seller (Grantor) is taxed at $3.00 per $1,000 of the sales price or assessed value, whichever is greater, while the buyer (Grantee) is taxed at $3.334 per $1,000 of the aggregate sales price or assessed value, plus any associated mortgage or deed of trust. Property tax rates and assessments vary considerably across Virginia; for 2026, rates stand at $1.12 per $100 of assessed value in Fairfax County, $1.135 in the City of Alexandria, and $1.053 in Arlington County. While these comparatively low rates make Northern Virginia an attractive jurisdiction, owners should also account for the personal property tax (commonly referred to as the “car tax”), which ranges from $2.00 to $5.00 per $100 of assessed value for vehicles, motorcycles, boats, and trailers.

Our firm recently encountered a troubling matter involving a condominium conversion in Northern Virginia. Under applicable practice, the jurisdiction does not begin taxing individual units until the year following completion of the conversion (once the declaration and bylaws have been recorded). In this case, that resulted in the whole building having one consolidated tax bill. This timing, while requiring careful explanation to buyers and lenders, is not itself objectionable. Nor was it unexpected that the taxing authority would assign a value to the building as it existed on January 1, with a supplemental bill to follow once construction was complete and certificates of occupancy issued. The difficulty lies in the fact that the January 1 assessment exceeded the estimated aggregate sales prices of all units combined, not with standing that no unit could lawfully be conveyed or occupied as of that date. The subsequent supplemental bill for the second half of the year exceeded the original assessment by a further 6.5%. It remains difficult to reconcile how an assessment predating any lawful conveyance or occupancy could exceed projected sales prices.

Of greater concern, the affordable dwelling units (“ADUs”) within the development were not assessed at the prices for which they could be sold, but rather at values derived from comparable market-rate units. The resulting disparity was substantial: in some instances, the actual sales price of an ADU amounted to only 25% of the assessor’s valuation. While Virginia imposes no statewide inclusionary zoning mandate, local requirements typically require affordable units to constitute between 6% and 10% of total units.

The Answer

I do not claim to have a comprehensive solution. In fairness, all of our jurisdictions have an array of programs intended to promote homeownership and promote affordable housing, so it’s not all bad news. However, the issues described above represent only a sample of the difficulties confronting the real estate community across our jurisdictions, which also include the recapture of prior tax reductions and the considerable variation in transaction and property tax regimes (to name a few).

In my extensive experience working with real estate developers, one observation has remained constant: the cost of residential development continues to rise significantly. With respect to taxation, each jurisdiction would be well served to adopt policies that encourage development, rather than imposing prolonged holding periods, delayed permitting, and additional costs and obstacles. Development activity — through the goods purchased, employment generated, and taxes collected in the course of construction, conversion, and rehabilitation — merits greater consideration, particularly in light of the increased property tax revenue and the income and sales tax contributions such development ultimately produces.

Given the numerous and jurisdiction-specific pitfalls described above, it is essential that buyers, sellers, and the broader real estate community consult experienced professionals familiar with these markets for guidance with your real estate transactions.

At 8:30 this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the July Consumer Price Index, and by 8:31 half of America’s mortgage desks were rewriting their rate sheets. The 30-year fixed is sitting near 6.63%. Every buyer with a pre-approval is refreshing a rate tracker. Every agent working the median market is holding their breath.

And in Kalorama, McLean, and Georgetown, not one of the people actually setting the top of this market noticed.

That is the story the Wall Street Journal put on a national stage this summer with its “billionaire bump” — and it is the story hiding inside the closing figures I’ve been watching all quarter. Washington’s luxury market isn’t defying the rate environment. It has simply exited it

.The numbers don’t cool in August

Conventional wisdom says the high end goes quiet after the spring frenzy and stays quiet until the leaves turn. Look at what actually closed.

The most expensive sale of the second quarter was 1169 Crest Lane in McLean — $12.845 million, closed April 14. Ten days later, its neighbor at 1175 Crest Lane traded for $12.45 million. Two eight-figure sales on the same street, inside two weeks, before the summer even started.

Zoom out and the pattern holds across the region. The D.C. metro recorded 767 luxury sales in the second quarter, up 4.5% year over year. McLean’s 22101 ZIP code alone led the entire Mid-Atlantic — 76 of its 144 sales, nearly 53%, cleared the luxury threshold. The price of admission to that threshold is now $1.9 million, up 5.6% in a year. Homes at this level went from listing to contract in a median of seven days. Inventory fell almost 19%.

Now the part that explains the rest: 33.6% of these sales were all cash. One in three of Washington’s most expensive homes traded with no mortgage, no rate lock, and no appraisal contingency. For a third of this market, the number that dominated the news this morning is a rounding error.

Bright MLS economist Lisa Sturtevant said it plainly: “High-income buyers are less sensitive to elevated mortgage rates and benefit from greater economic security.” That is the whole thesis in one sentence.

Who’s actually writing the checks

The Journal framed it as a wealth migration, and the buyer roster of the past eighteen months reads like a seating chart for power in this city.

Mark Zuckerberg paid roughly $23 million for a 15,400-square-foot compound in Massachusetts Avenue Heights, minutes from the White House. Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald chairman, set a neighborhood record at $25 million for a French-château estate in Foxhall. Treasury’s Scott Bessent took a Federal-style Georgetown home for $12.5 million; Senator David McCormick, another Wall Street name, paid $10.5 million a few blocks away. David Sacks landed around $10.3 million.

Notice the through-line. This is banking and finance money — hedge fund principals, a bond-market chairman, a Treasury secretary — buying trophy real estate not as an investment play but as a foothold. They are buying proximity. In this town, that has always been the most valuable square footage there is.

And it isn’t only the billionaires. The names one tier down tell the same story with smaller decimals: a $3.77 million Georgetown townhouse to a CFO and a PR executive, a $3.33 million Cleveland Park house to Google’s head of federal policy, a $3.8 million new build in Chevy Chase. Cash-comfortable, career-secure, rate-indifferent. The same buyer, one weight class lighter.

What this means if you’re selling — or reading a rate headline

For sellers at the top of this market, the lesson of the quarter is that you are not competing with the Federal Reserve. You are competing with 917 listings — a historically thin shelf — for a pool of buyers who have already decided that Washington is where they need to be. Price to that reality and you sell in a week.

For everyone reading this morning’s CPI coverage and wondering what it means for the luxury market: it means almost nothing. The rate everyone is watching applies to a market these buyers left behind. When a third of your comparable sales close in cash and the rest are financed by people for whom the payment is immaterial, the mortgage rate stops being a market force and becomes a piece of trivia.

Washington’s most expensive houses are trading on a different frequency entirely. This morning proved it again.

This is the American side of a story that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. The same capital reshaping Georgetown and Kalorama is reshaping Mayfair and Chelsea — often held by the very same people. On Friday, I’ll take you across the Atlantic to a London listing that shows exactly what that money buys on the other end. My colleagues at Sotheby’s in the UK will want to see this one.

James Bell is a licensed broker in Washington, D.C. and Georgia with more than thirty years and $1.2 billion in closed transactions. Billion Dollar Broker publishes to more than 7,000 subscribers.

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The desk was set up and the seal was on it. On the morning of June 24, industry and congressional leaders were filing into the Capitol for the signing ceremony, and Senator Elizabeth Warren was live on CNBC taking a victory lap for the biggest housing bill the United States had produced since 1990 — when the President posted that he wouldn’t sign it, calling it “the Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill, which is of minor importance.”

“I thought it was a joke,” Warren later told The New York Times. It wasn’t. At midnight on July 11, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act became law anyway — no signature, no ceremony, no President in the room. Trump let the ten-day clock run out in protest over an unrelated elections bill; the votes to override any veto were already sitting in both chambers, and everyone knew it.

But the sulk is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is that the bill got over the line at all. It began as an unlikely friendship — Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat, and Tim Scott, the conservative Republican who chairs the Senate banking committee, who sat side by side through years of hearings and decided to attempt the first major housing bill since 1990. It nearly died a dozen times: stripped from the defense bill, watered down in the House, revived only when Warren and Maxine Waters cut a deal by phone in June. A polarized Congress, a hostile president — and it passed anyway, because the housing problem has become impossible to ignore.

But notice where all that energy went. The fiercest fight, the one Warren said “ripped the heart out of it,” was over the private-equity cap — over who is allowed to own homes — not over how to build more of them. A few days later, the Financial Times explained, better than any politician has, why that instinct gets the crisis exactly backwards.

This is not an American story. It is a rich-world failure.

The FT‘s survey is essential reading because it refuses to treat this as one country’s misfortune. The same pattern repeats wherever the modern economy concentrates work and money into a few cities. Dublin’s housing demand has jumped 40 percent since 2011 while its stock grew at half that rate — the worst shortage in the developed world. San Francisco, Lisbon, Sydney, London: the story rhymes everywhere.

And the cost is not abstract. It is a generation being locked out. In Ireland, the share of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents has more than doubled, to 42 percent. Among the bottom third of young earners it is worse still — 75 percent in Dublin and San Francisco, 55 percent in London. These are not lifestyle choices. They are people we have failed to build homes for. That is what the housing crisis actually is: a population that needs to be housed, and a rich world that has decided, city by city, not to house it.

There is one solution, and the evidence is no longer in dispute

You can treat the symptom or cure the disease. Rent control — the policy that carried New York’s incoming mayor into office — “eases pressures for people who already have a home,” as one economist told the FT, “but it doesn’t house the people without one.” It rations scarcity. It does not end it.

The cure is supply. Build more homes, of the right kind, in the right places. Where cities have done it, it has worked with striking consistency. Austin let developers build through a demand boom and watched rents fall — not slow, fall — while young homeownership climbed from 70 to 80 percent. Auckland rezoned for density in 2016 and rents flattened. Where building freezes — London after its post-Grenfell cost load, Dublin, the Croydon scheme killed by its own council — prices climb out of reach and stay there. The clearest finding in housing economics: the countries that build, house their people; the countries that don’t, don’t.

Which is the test to apply to the new law. The Road to Housing Act is strongest where it clears the path to build — easing federal regulation, streamlining reviews, backing factory-built homes — and weakest where it restricts, capping investors in a way the FT warns “may worsen” affordability without producing a single new home. Judge it by one question: does it get homes built? To the extent it does, it is the most important thing America has done for housing in thirty years. To the extent it doesn’t, it is theater.

Britain is about to run the boldest version of the experiment

This past Monday, Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on the largest state housebuilding program since the postwar years — and he’s earned the benefit of the doubt: Manchester, the city he ran for nine years, is the one genuine British building success the FT can point to, built by working with developers so that when demand arrived, homes followed.

The part I’d press him on is the tax. You cannot build your way out of a shortage while taxing the act of buying and moving into paralysis. Punitive stamp duty doesn’t just freeze prices; it freezes people in place and strangles the turnover that makes construction pay. Burnham’s reported plan to scrap stamp duty and council tax for a single annual, proportional levy on value is the most pro-supply idea on his desk. It is also the American model — a yearly charge on what a home is worth, and nothing on the courage to buy it.

The direction of travel, on both sides of the Atlantic, is finally right. Warren has already told her caucus to start on “Road 2.0,” and the political will is permanent now; voters won’t let it fade. The only question is what we aim it at. Growth is not the thing to be managed here. Building — at scale — is the answer. There are people who need to be housed, and there has only ever been one way to house them.

— James Bell

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But purchasing a second home isn’t quite the same as buying your primary residence. Vacation properties often come with unique legal and title issues that buyers don’t encounter in a typical suburban neighborhood. While the location may be idyllic, it’s important to understand exactly what you’re buying before you get the keys.

Here are a few issues every buyer should consider before falling in love with that perfect summer retreat.

Waterfront Property Comes with Additional Questions

For many buyers, the biggest draw is being on the water. But owning waterfront property involves more than simply enjoying the view.

One of the first questions is whether you actually own all the land leading to the water. In some cases, another governmental entity or homeowners association may own portions of the shoreline. There may also be restrictions on building docks, installing boat lifts, or constructing seawalls.

Even if a dock already exists, buyers should verify that it was properly permitted and that any licenses or permits are transferable. Assumptions can become expensive surprises after closing.

Understanding Riparian Rights

If you’re purchasing waterfront property, you’ll likely hear the term riparian rights.

Simply put, riparian rights are the legal rights associated with property bordering a river, lake, or other body of water. Depending on state and local law, these rights may include access to the water, boating, fishing, or constructing certain improvements.

However, these rights are not unlimited. Environmental regulations, state agencies, and local ordinances often govern what owners can and cannot do. In some areas, portions of the waterfront below the high-water mark remain publicly owned, even though they appear to be part of the property.

Understanding exactly what rights transfer with the property is an important part of the title review process.

Easements Can Affect Your Enjoyment

Vacation properties frequently involve easements.

An easement gives someone else the legal right to use a portion of your property for a specific purpose. Utility companies often have easements for electric or water lines, but waterfront communities may also have easements allowing neighboring owners to access the shoreline, community docks, or beaches.

Some easements are obvious. Others may only appear in recorded documents that are discovered during the title search.

An easement doesn’t necessarily make a property less desirable, but buyers should understand how it affects their ownership before settlement.

Shared Driveways Require Cooperation

Many vacation homes—particularly older cottages and rural properties—share driveways with neighboring owners.

A shared driveway agreement outlines who is responsible for maintenance, repairs, snow removal, and future improvements. Without a properly recorded agreement, disagreements can arise years later over expenses or access.

A title search will often uncover recorded easements or maintenance agreements governing shared driveways. If none exist, buyers should ask questions before closing rather than after a dispute develops.

Private Wells and Septic Systems

Unlike homes connected to municipal water and sewer systems, many vacation properties rely on private wells and septic systems.

Those systems often come with recorded maintenance agreements or shared-use arrangements if neighboring homes draw from the same well or utilize a shared septic facility.

Buyers should determine:

• Who is responsible for maintenance?

• Are inspections required?

• Are there recorded cost-sharing agreements?

• Has the system been properly maintained?

Understanding these obligations before closing can prevent unexpected expenses later.

Flood Insurance: A Cost Buyers Shouldn’t Overlook

For many waterfront and coastal properties, flood insurance has become a significant factor in the overall cost of ownership. While buyers often focus on the purchase price, mortgage payment, and property taxes, flood insurance premiums can add thousands of dollars annually to the cost of owning a home.

Premiums vary based on several factors, including the property’s elevation, location within a designated flood zone, the age and construction of the home, and the amount of coverage selected. In recent years, changes to federal flood insurance rating methodologies have resulted in substantial premium increases for some property owners, making it more important than ever for buyers to obtain flood insurance quotes early in the purchasing process.

Even if flood insurance is not required by a lender, buyers should carefully evaluate the property’s flood risk. A home that has never experienced flooding isn’t necessarily immune from future events, particularly as weather patterns continue to change and severe storms become more frequent.

Before making an offer on a waterfront property, ask whether the home is located in a Special Flood Hazard Area, whether the current owner maintains flood insurance, and whether there have been any prior flood claims. Understanding these factors upfront can help avoid surprises after closing and provide a more accurate picture of the true cost of owning your dream vacation home.

The Value of Looking Beyond the View

Vacation homes are emotional purchases. Buyers often envision family gatherings, summer cookouts, fishing trips, and years of memories before they ever think about easements or title reports.

That’s understandable.

But taking the time to understand the legal characteristics of the property is every bit as important as admiring the scenery.

An experienced title company reviews public records, examines the chain of title, identifies easements and restrictions, and works to resolve issues before closing. That due diligence helps ensure buyers receive not only the property they expect, but also the legal rights they believe they’re purchasing.

The best closings are often the ones where buyers never realize how much work occurred behind the scenes.

As summer continues and many families begin searching for their own getaway, remember that the perfect vacation home isn’t defined solely by the water views or the sunsets. It’s also defined by having a clear understanding of the property’s legal rights, responsibilities, and long-term costs of ownership.

After all, peace of mind is one of the best amenities any vacation home can offer.

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Nationally, the spring test came back muddy. Existing-home sales slipped in June, in the season meant to carry the year, with the thirty-year fixed parked near 6.5%. Prices held to a record anyway. Not a boom — a market clearing slowly, with rates doing the gatekeeping.

Here’s what the headline misses: a softer market is not a slow one for the right house. DC homes are still going to contract in about forty days, versus sixty nationally. It’s the tired listings and deferred-maintenance stock collecting price cuts — not move-in-ready product in prime addresses.

So the message to sellers is plain. The frenzy premium is over; you won’t be rescued by ten offers on an overpriced house. But the discipline premium is very much alive. Price to the comps, present it properly, and quality still commands speed.

For buyers, it’s inverted: real leverage on anything that’s been sitting, none on the best of it. Waiting for rates to drop has been a losing bet for two years running.

And capital is mobile. The client weighing a Georgetown townhouse against a Chelsea flat isn’t hypothetical — that’s a conversation I have most weeks now.

More on the London side of it in the next letter.

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Here is a number I put in front of a client in Mayfair last month, and it stopped the conversation cold.

He is American. He owns a house in Washington. He wants a flat in London — a real one, three bedrooms, lateral, somewhere he can leave a suit and a decent bottle. Call it £5 million.

His stamp duty bill is £863,750.

Not his closing costs. Not his fees, his lawyers, his survey, his Land Registry. His tax. Wired to HM Revenue & Customs on completion day, before he has turned a key, and never seen again. It is 17.3% of the purchase price. The last pound he spends is taxed at 19% — 12% top band, plus the 5% surcharge for owning another home, plus 2% for the crime of being a foreigner.

He looked at the number for a long moment and said: “So I have to make eighteen percent just to break even.”

Yes. That is exactly what it means. And it is why prime central London, one of the great cities on earth, is trading roughly 24% below its 2014 peak while global wealth has compounded for a decade.

Now Andy Burnham wants to abolish it.

What is actually on the table:

Let’s be precise, because the market is not being precise.

Burnham will almost certainly be Prime Minister within ten days. Nominations closed the way everyone knew they would; he took 322 of Labour’s 403 MPs on day one. Starmer hands over the keys on the 20th.

He has not published a housing tax policy. What he has done is say, on the record and repeatedly, that he has “long been persuaded of the argument for a land value tax” and that council tax — still assessed on 1991 valuations, which is a sentence that ought to embarrass a serious country — is “highly regressive.” He is a listed supporter of Fairer Share, a cross-party campaign whose plan is now reportedly being worked through by his team.

The Fairer Share Plan is simple enough to fit on a napkin. Abolish stamp duty. Abolish council tax. Replace both with a flat annual charge of 0.48% of the property’s value. Second homes, empty homes, and homes owned by overseas buyers pay double: 0.96%.

Read that again if you’re American. An annual tax, levied as a percentage of assessed value, with a surcharge for non-occupants, and no tax on the transaction itself.

That is the District of Columbia. That is Virginia. That is Connecticut, Florida, and every other jurisdiction where you have ever owned a home.

The mirror: Georgetown vs London

A $5 million house in Georgetown pays DC roughly $46,000 a year — 0.85% on the first $2.558m, 1.00% above. When you bought it, you paid 1.45% recordation. Nobody in Washington considers this exotic. It’s a line item. You underwrite it, you forget it, you pay it in two installments and complain about the trash collection.

Under Burnham’s scheme, a £5 million London flat owned by an American would pay 0.96% — about £48,000 a year — and nothing at all to buy it.

We have spent a decade telling American clients that London is expensive to enter. What we mean is that London is expensive to enter. It is cheap to own. The proposal inverts both.

Here is the trade, in full:

At £1.5 million, an American second-home buyer pays £198,750 in stamp duty today — 13.3%. The proposed annual levy would be £14,400. It would take fourteen years of the new tax to equal one afternoon of the old one.

At £3 million: £483,750 today, 16.1%. Annual levy, £28,800. Seventeen years.

At £5 million: £863,750 today, 17.3%. Annual levy, £48,000. Eighteen years.

At £10 million: £1,813,750 today, 18.1%. Annual levy, £96,000. Nineteen years.

Eighteen years. On a £5 million flat, it takes eighteen years of Burnham’s annual tax to equal what the British government takes from you on the first afternoon under the current one. And in the meantime, you would have paid nothing at all to buy it.

Why is this both a price event and a policy event?

Strip a transaction tax out of a market and the price goes up. This is not a forecast. It is arithmetic, and we have run the experiment in both directions.

Britain has raised its transaction tax five times in twelve years. The slab-to-slice reform of 2014, which loaded the top end. The 3% additional-homes surcharge in 2016. The 2% non-resident surcharge in 2021. The surcharge lifted from 3% to 5% in October 2024. The abolition of Multiple Dwellings Relief. Over precisely that period, prime central London fell about a quarter from peak, and it did so while the city kept its schools, its law, its language, its art market, its safety, and its time zone. Nothing about London got worse. The toll to get in got worse.

Run it the other way and you get the 2020–21 stamp duty holiday, which produced a transaction surge and a price surge, in the middle of a pandemic, for no reason other than that the tax was briefly gone.

A buyer prices the tax. A seller absorbs part of it in the discount. Remove the tax and that discount has nowhere to go but into the price.

And the current discount is real. LonRes had prime London values down 8.2% year-on-year in June, transactions down 12.7% in the first half, an average 10.4% gap between asking and achieved, and half of all sold properties previously reduced. Savills reckons average prime central London prices are down 24.5% from the 2014 peak. That is not a market in trouble. That is a market with a tax problem, wearing a discount as a bandage.

Now, the part nobody selling you a flat will tell you…

I would not be doing my job if I gave you only the bull case.

One: None of this is Policy Yet. Burnham has not published a plan, and a former Treasury adviser I read this week put the odds bluntly — full replacement of council tax and stamp duty is a multi-year exercise that a new government is more likely to kick into the next manifesto than deliver in year one.

Two: The Near-Term Risk Runs the Other Way. The High Value Council Tax Surcharge — the mansion tax — is already legislated to hit £2m-plus homes from April 2028, and reporting suggests Burnham may cut that threshold to £1.5m. The plausible eighteen-month outcome is not that stamp duty goes away. It is that an annual tax arrives on top of it.

Three: An Annual tax is a Permanent Liability. Knight Frank’s Tom Bill made the sharpest point in the debate: annual revaluations convert house price growth into an ongoing tax bill. Under this system, your appreciation invoices you. Americans know this and price it. Many British owners have never in their lives paid tax on the value of their homes, and they are about to.

Four: The 0.96% is Still a Penalty Rate. Britain is not proposing to stop taxing foreigners more. It proposes moving the penalty from the front door to the annual bill.

What I am telling clients.

Do not wait for the announcement. That is the whole of my advice, and here is why:

If reform comes, it will be announced long before it is enacted, and the day it is announced, the market freezes — nobody signs a contract with a £864,000 tax bill attached when abolition has a date on it — and then it unfreezes violently, upward, with the discount gone and the sellers holding the pen. You will not get to buy in the gap. Nobody does.

Meanwhile, the direction of travel is unmistakable, and it is one-way. Every serious party in Britain — Labour under Burnham, and the Conservatives, who have also pledged to scrap stamp duty — is converging on the same conclusion: tax the asset, not the transaction. Whatever the final shape, the entry cost is going down and the carrying cost is going up. Permanently.

Which means the buyer who wins is the one who buys into today’s discount at today’s carry, pays a one-time cost that is painful but finite and fully known, and owns the asset when the toll booth comes down.

The buyer who loses is the one who waits, misses the discount, and inherits the annual bill anyway.

London is not cheap because London is broken. London is cheap because Britain built a tax that punishes the act of buying, and is now, at last, having second thoughts.

We have about a year.

Jim Bell

202-607-4000

Jim Bell is Executive Vice President and Global Advisor at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington, DC, and Consultant at Sotheby’s International Realty UK on the DC–London corridor. He has closed approximately $1.2 billion in transactions. Reply to this note if you’d like the full underwriting on a specific price point — or an introduction in London.

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When the plates were cleared, Greenspan explained, with the patience of a man who had explained far more complicated things to far less attentive rooms, that one did not leave the table after lunch at the Metropolitan Club without having a chocolate chip cookie. It was not optional. It was tradition, and tradition, in his telling, was a form of respect — for the room, for the people who came before you in it, for the ordinary civilities that hold a place together when no one is watching.

That was the lesson. The man who could move global markets with a single syllable spent the back half of a lunch making sure a kid he would almost certainly never see again didn’t miss the cookies. The brilliance was real — you felt it the way you feel weather — but the thing that stayed with me was the graciousness, scaled all the way down to the person directly in front of him. I have met a great many powerful people since. Most of them never learned that part.

A few years later, the federal budget did something I had been taught was theoretically possible and practically mythological. It balanced, then ran a surplus, then did it again. I was still young enough to find it astonishing, almost magical. I watched a column of numbers walk down to zero and keep going, and a fair share of the credit sat with the man who had shown me, with great seriousness, which cookie to take at the club.

History will argue about the rest — the exuberance he called irrational, the deregulation, the crisis that arrived the year after he left, and rearranged how everyone remembers him. Let the economists have it. They will be at it for decades, in the deliberately fogged dialect he invented to keep them busy.

I’ll keep the smaller thing.

I never had lunch with him again.

I have never once skipped the cookie.

-James Bell

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The Basic Framework

Under DC law, properties are classified into different tax classes, and the classification assigned to a property determines its tax rate. Most residential properties fall under Class 1 (A or B), with rates of $0.85 and $1(for value over 2.558 million) per $100 of assessed value, respectively. Vacant properties, however, are subject to a dramatically higher rate. Properties designated as vacant are taxed at $5.00 per $100 of assessed value — nearly six times the standard residential rate. Properties deemed “blighted,” meaning they pose safety or health hazards or are in serious disrepair, face an even steeper rate of $10.00 per $100 of assessed value.

This punitive tax structure is intentional. The goal is to make holding onto an empty property financially painful enough that owners either develop the property, sell it to someone who will, or at a minimum maintain it in a habitable condition.

How Properties Are Designated Vacant

The Office of Tax and Revenue (OTR) works in conjunction with the Department of Buildings (formerly the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs) to identify and designate vacant properties. A property can be classified as vacant if it is unoccupied and either lacks a certificate of occupancy, has failed an inspection, or has had its utilities disconnected. The designation process typically begins with a complaint, a routine inspection sweep, or a flag triggered by utility data.

Once a property is identified as potentially vacant, the Department of Buildings conducts an inspection. If confirmed, the owner is notified, and the property is placed on the vacant property list, triggering the higher tax

classification for the following assessment cycle. Owners are given an opportunity to appeal the designation, which is an important safeguard given that erroneous designations do occur, particularly for properties that are temporarily unoccupied during renovation or between tenants.

Exemptions and Appeals

Not every empty building automatically faces the punitive rate. The District provides several exemptions for owners who can demonstrate legitimate reasons for vacancy. Properties actively under construction or renovation with valid permits may be exempt. Additionally, properties that are for sale or rent, provided they are being actively marketed, can apply for a vacancy exemption as well. Estate properties caught in probate, properties owned by government entities, and those subject to certain legal disputes may also qualify for exemptions.

The appeals process runs through the Office of Tax and Revenue and, if necessary, the Office of Administrative Hearings. Owners contesting a vacant designation must typically provide evidence of occupancy — utility bills, lease agreements, proof of ongoing permitted construction, or documentation of active marketing efforts. The burden of proof falls largely on the property owner, which can be challenging for estates or out-of-state owners who may not have organized records readily at hand.

Assessment Values and the Double Impact

A critical point often overlooked is that the punitive tax rate applies to the assessed value of the property, not just some nominal figure. The Office of Tax and Revenue assesses properties annually at what it determines to be fair market value. In a city where land values in many neighborhoods have appreciated dramatically over the past two decades, the assessed values underlying these calculations can be substantial. A modest rowhouse in a transitional neighborhood assessed at $600,000 would face an annual tax bill of $30,000 under the vacant rate — a powerful incentive to act.

This double pressure — high assessed values combined with high tax rates — is what gives DC’s vacant property tax its teeth. Critics argue that it can be devastating for low-income longtime homeowners who find themselves unable to maintain or occupy a property due to health, financial hardship, or family circumstances. Advocates for the policy counter that the exemptions are designed to protect such cases and that the overall public interest in reducing blight justifies the framework.

The Broader Policy Goal

Ultimately, vacant property taxation in the District is a land use tool as much as a revenue mechanism. The District faces persistent pressure to produce more housing units and revitalize corridors that have languished for decades. By making vacancy expensive, the City helps move properties back into active use. Whether the current rates strike the right balance remains a live debate, but the underlying logic is straightforward: in a city with as much demand as Washington, DC, a “vacant” property is a civic failure, and the tax code reflects that judgment.

Coming Soon… in fiscal year 2027 (October 2026 - September 2027), the vacant property tax rates and exemptions will undergo a significant overhaul. We will examine those changes in the coming months.

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Last week, Nicole Friedman reported in the Wall Street Journal that real estate agents are quitting the slow market now grinding through its fourth year. She’s right, and the piece is worth your time. She follows a Fort Worth agent who launched a brokerage in 2023 on a good market, watched rates and prices strangle demand, sent most of her team off to find second jobs — her husband took a position with a school district — and finally closed the doors this spring, calling the last stretch the hardest of her career. I read it with sympathy, then with recognition, then with a contrarian’s itch. The headline tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you what it means.

The numbers aren’t in dispute. By the Journal‘s account, the ranks of full-time agents and brokers fell by 72,000 in a single year — the steepest drop since 2008. The National Association of Realtors has shed something on the order of 400,000 members from its pandemic peak. Last year’s sales pace was the slowest since 1982, when I was a teenager in Atlanta who couldn’t have told you what a basis point was. The exodus is real. People are hurting. None of that is the part worth arguing with.

Here’s the part the breaking-point framing misses: a great many of the people leaving were never in the business in the sense the word is meant to carry. The boom manufactured agents. When money is nearly free, and a listing clears over a weekend, a license stops being a craft and becomes a toll booth — a thing you hold up to collect on a transaction the market was going to complete with or without you. Hundreds of thousands of people walked through that booth between 2020 and 2022. It should surprise no one that they’re walking back out.

I’ve been doing this since 1989. I’ve now watched three of these cullings — the early nineties, 2008, and whatever we end up calling this one. Each time, the trade press writes the obituary of the American real-estate agent. And each time, with real and painful exceptions, the people who leave are the people who arrived when it was easy.

This isn’t a sneer at the Fort Worth broker. Closing a business you built with your own name on the door is a specific kind of grief, and anyone who has signed a lease and made payroll knows it doesn’t care whether you deserved it. She did nothing wrong. She was early, and she was unlucky on timing, which in this trade is most of what luck is. But look closely at what actually thinned: the part-timers, the boom hires, the people for whom real estate was a side door into easy money. The profession didn’t shrink so much as it sobered up.

The reporting says the survivors will be the well-capitalized and the genuine producers. True enough. But capital isn’t the moat. Trust is the moat — and trust is the one asset a slow market mints rather than melts. My best clients were never closed in a frenzy. They were earned over years: dinners, unbilled advice, the occasional and unpopular don’t buy that one. In a hot market that work is invisible, because anyone can sell a house when the houses sell themselves. In a market like this one, it’s the only thing that works at all.

Which brings me to the figure that ought to worry the right people. Nearly half of would-be buyers and sellers told surveyors this year they’d consider skipping an agent altogether, and three in four agents expect to be competing with software and artificial intelligence. Good. They should be. If your value to a client was looking up listings and unlocking a door, your phone has been outperforming you for a decade, and AI will finish the argument. What a model cannot do is sit across a table and tell someone the truth about a house, or take the eleven-o’clock call when a deal is coming apart and a family is frightened. Dario Amodei made the point in the FT this spring that AI spreads at the speed of trust. So does everything else in this business. It always has.

My dry cleaner, for the record, let his license lapse. He's much happier, I'm told, and the pressing has never been better. I don't say that to be unkind. I say it because the slow market is doing the profession a favor it would never do for itself: it's reminding everyone that this was always hard work, and that the hard work was always the point. So to the agents still standing in the fourth year of it — still making the calls, still telling clients the truth, still showing up when the easy money left town — I'll say only this. Keep going. The market that broke the others is building your reputation.

— Jim Bell, Billion Dollar Broker, June 7, 2026

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Most homeowners understand the importance of protecting themselves from identity theft and cybercrime, but fewer are aware of a growing real estate-related threat: title theft and seller impersonation. While these crimes remain relatively uncommon, their financial and legal consequences can be severe. Understanding how these schemes work and recognizing the warning signs can help homeowners and real estate professionals avoid becoming victims.

Understanding the Threat

Title theft occurs when a criminal fraudulently transfers ownership of a property into their own name—or that of another party—without the owner’s knowledge or consent. This is typically accomplished through forged documents, false identification, and the recording of a fraudulent deed in local land records. Once the transfer is recorded, the fraudster may attempt to sell the property, obtain loans against its equity, or use it in other financial schemes.

Seller impersonation involves a criminal posing as the legitimate property owner and attempting to sell the property through a real estate broker, attorney, or title company. Using forged identification and ownership information, the fraudster seeks to complete a sale before the true owner becomes aware of the transaction.

Vacant land, vacation homes, rental properties, and homes owned free and clear of a mortgage are often targeted because there may be fewer parties actively monitoring ownership records. These properties are generally considered higher-risk for fraud attempts.

How These Schemes Work

Most title fraud begins with information gathered from public records. Property ownership information is readily available through many local government websites, allowing criminals to identify properties with substantial equity and limited oversight.

The fraudster may then create forged deeds and signatures and submit those documents for recording. If accepted, public records may temporarily reflect the criminal as the property’s owner. Using the same information, the fraudster can also create fraudulent identification that mimics the true owner’s signature and identity.

Once apparent ownership has been established, the criminal may attempt to:

· Sell the property to an unsuspecting buyer.

· Obtain a mortgage or home equity loan.

· Transfer ownership through multiple parties to complicate the ownership trail.

· Use the property as collateral in financial transactions.

In many cases, the true owner does not discover the fraud until receiving notices from lenders, collection agencies, government offices, or prospective purchasers.

Warning Signs of Potential Fraud

Homeowners should remain alert for unusual activity involving their property. Potential warning signs include:

· Bills or correspondence addressed to someone else at the property.

· Unexpected notices regarding loans, liens, or mortgage applications.

· Changes in property tax statements or assessment notices.

· Mail indicating ownership transfers that were never authorized.

· Unexplained inquiries from real estate agents or prospective buyers.

· Difficulty accessing property records that previously reflected the correct ownership information.

Real estate professionals should also recognize common red flags when dealing with sellers, particularly involving vacant land, rental properties, or mortgage-free homes. Warning signs may include sellers who:

· Insist on communicating only by phone, email, or text.

· Seek a sales price significantly below market value.

· Push for a quick closing or an all-cash transaction.

· Refuse to appear in person for settlement, often claiming to be out of state or overseas.

While none of these factors alone proves fraud, they should prompt additional verification and due diligence.

Steps to Reduce Risk

Although no preventive measure can eliminate all risk, several practical steps can significantly reduce vulnerability to title theft and seller impersonation.

1. Monitor Property Records

Regularly reviewing property ownership records can help identify unauthorized changes before significant damage occurs. In the District of Columbia and Maryland, land records are available online at no cost. Real estate professionals should also review ownership records before listing or handling transactions involving unfamiliar properties.

Beyond fraud prevention, property record reviews often reveal important information such as additional owners, outstanding issues, or matters that should be addressed before a sale.

2. Protect Personal Information

Title thieves often rely on stolen personal information. Homeowners and real estate professionals should safeguard sensitive documents, avoid transmitting confidential information through unsecured channels, and properly store or destroy financial records. Strong cybersecurity practices can reduce opportunities for identity-related fraud.

3. Pay Attention to Unexpected Notices

Correspondence relating to mortgages, liens, deeds, or ownership changes should never be ignored. Prompt investigation of unusual notices can help uncover fraudulent activity before a transaction progresses further.

4. Keep Contact Information Current

Owners of second homes, rental properties, and vacant land should ensure tax authorities and other relevant agencies have current mailing and contact information. Receiving notices promptly can be critical in detecting unauthorized activity.

5. Consider Enhanced Owner’s Title Insurance

Owner’s title insurance protects against covered title defects that affect ownership rights. Many enhanced owner’s title insurance policies provide affirmative coverage for fraud and forgery occurring after settlement. This can offer broader protection than a standard owner’s policy, which typically focuses on defects existing before settlement.

Homeowners should consult their title insurance provider or title professional to understand the specific protections available under their policy and determine whether enhanced coverage may be appropriate for their circumstances.

Staying Vigilant

Title theft and seller impersonation can create significant legal and financial challenges for both homeowners and real estate professionals. Although fraudulent transfers can often be reversed through legal action—and may be covered under a quality owner’s title insurance policy—the process can be costly, time-consuming, and stressful.

Awareness remains the most effective defense. By monitoring property records, protecting personal information, verifying unusual activity, and exercising appropriate due diligence, homeowners and real estate professionals can reduce their risk and better protect one of their most valuable assets.

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The answer is yes. Here’s why I’m saying it out loud.

I’ve been showing American buyers property in prime London since 2016. I know what that market feels like when it’s expensive and indifferent to you, and I know what it feels like when it’s leaning in your direction. Right now, it’s leaning in.

I just came back from London. I toured properties across prime central — Kensington, Mayfair, Chelsea, and Marylebone. What I found surprised even me. Well-priced inventory. Motivated sellers. A city that wants buyers back.

Americans Are Driving the Market

This is no longer sentiment. Americans now account for roughly 25 percent of prime London property purchases, according to major estate agents, with inquiries from U.S. buyers reaching an eight-year high in early 2025. In 2024, Americans overtook Chinese buyers as the largest foreign buyer group in prime central London — a title once held by Middle Eastern royals and Hong Kong billionaires.

The currency math alone is compelling. According to Knight Frank, since July 2014, dollar-denominated buyers have received an effective discount of roughly 38 percent in prime central London — accounting for both currency movement and price softness. Put plainly: $1 million buys around 34 square meters in prime London today, compared to just 23 square meters in 2014. You are getting meaningfully more for your dollar than at any point in the past decade.

The softening at the top of the market has been real. Properties over £5 million have seen a 45 percent increase in price reductions, according to LonRes. For cash-rich American buyers, that’s an opening.

Sotheby’s Is Where the Action Is

Our own brand’s numbers tell the story at the institutional level. UK Sotheby’s International Realty posted £1.63 billion in 2025 sales, led by Mayfair and Knightsbridge in a record prime London year. In 2024, the firm secured the number one market share in both the £10 million-plus and £15 million-plus property segments — all in under two years of rebuilding. When a brand built on discretion and global reach produces numbers like those in a “challenging” market, the underlying demand is real.

On the global side, Sotheby’s International Realty reached $157 billion in 2024 global sales volume — and specifically flagged London as a key market for international expansion.

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The Tax Headwind — and Why It May Not Last

There is a legitimate downside, and I won’t bury it. The callout box above shows the full picture. The short version: an American buying a prime London property as a second home faces standard SDLT, an additional property surcharge, and a non-resident surcharge — stacking to a top rate of 19 percent for overseas buyers purchasing an additional property.

On a £3 million flat in Knightsbridge, you’re writing a tax check approaching £480,000 before you hang a picture. That is real money.

But here’s what experienced buyers understand: taxes imposed by governments can be reduced by governments. Attractive pricing of the right stock has sustained interest from international buyers, as motivated vendors have been willing to conclude on terms that might previously have been rejected. Buyers who moved while sellers were flexible will look very smart if policy shifts and competition returns. The buyers waiting for the tax cut will be competing against each other in a suddenly crowded market

What I Saw on the Ground

I toured properties that in 2021 would have had competing offers before the second viewing. Today, they are available, priced with intention, and represented by agents who are ready to engage. Prime London hasn’t lost its fundamentals — the architecture, the neighborhoods, the global demand from tenants, the cultural gravity. What it shed was the frothy premium. That is exactly when serious buyers move.

I’ve had this conversation with clients across the DC–London corridor for nearly a decade. The ones who acted when the market gave them an opening are glad they did. The ones who waited for certainty are still waiting.

The Bottom Line

Prime London is not distressed. It’s disciplined. Inventory is available, sellers are realistic, the dollar is strong, and Americans are the most active cohort of foreign buyers in the market. The tax burden is real — but it’s a policy number, not a permanent condition.

If you’ve been thinking about London, this is the moment to have the conversation. I just walked those streets. I know what’s available and what it’s priced at.

The window is open.

Jim Bell is Executive Vice President and Global Advisor at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. He has been advising American buyers in the London prime market since 2016.

Washington reinvents itself on a fixed schedule, the way some people buy a new car the moment the lease is up — not because the old one failed, but because the calendar said it was time.

I watched it happen again this week. The primaries rolled in from a dozen states, the city read the tea leaves the way it always does, and by morning, a certain kind of Washingtonian had quietly concluded that the next chapter might be better lived somewhere else. They won’t say that’s why. They’ll say the kids are gone, or the winters got long, or they’ve always wanted a place near the water. And they’ll be telling the truth — just not the whole of it. In this town, the personal reason and the political weather tend to arrive in the same envelope.

I find the whole thing oddly comforting. After thirty years and somewhere north of a billion dollars in other people’s front doors, I’ve stopped being surprised by the churn and started being fond of it. Washington is a city that cannot sit still. It is always either arriving or leaving, packing or unpacking, and a remarkable number of those boxes pass through my hands.

What I’ve learned is that the house is never the reason. It’s the occasion.

Some of the occasions are joyful. A family outgrows its walls. A career takes off, or finally lets someone leave. But many are quieter, and a few are heavy. The children are launched and the rooms echo. The stairs that were nothing at fifty have become the day’s main negotiation at eighty. There’s a move to a single floor, or to a community where help is down the hall, or the slow and tender business of selling a house because the person you shared it with is no longer in it. I have stood in a lot of kitchens while someone decided what their next, smaller life was going to look like. It is the most human work I do, and the part the spreadsheets never capture.

Through all of it, I keep one fixed point. While Washington changes its mind every other November, I drive out to a historic farm in Somerville, Virginia, where the fields have not had a strong opinion about anything since 1835. The contrast is the whole secret. You cannot watch a city reinvent itself this often without somewhere quiet to watch it from. The farm is my somewhere. It is also, not coincidentally, where I do my clearest thinking about what my clients actually need, which is rarely what the market thinks they need.

Here’s what the market gets wrong. It treats a sale as an ending and a purchase as a separate beginning, two transactions performed by two sets of strangers who never speak. For most of my career that was simply the way of things. You sold a Washingtonian their freedom and then waved as they vanished into someone else’s territory, hoping the agent on the other end was halfway competent.

And more often than you’d think, the call comes from the new city. The owner is already in Tampa, or Tampa-adjacent, phoning about a house in Kalorama they’re no longer standing in. The move happened first; the listing is the loose end. By the time I have the keys, the family photos are already on a wall a thousand miles away. Which tells you something about the old way of doing this: the right moment to have me in the room was before they left, with both ends of the move in one set of hands.

So I got tired of hoping, and I built that team — one that spans the corridor my clients actually live in: Washington, London, New York, Los Angeles, Georgia, Tampa and Palm Beach. And I stay in it for the whole journey. Not the listing and a handshake goodbye. The whole arc. The hard conversation about whether it’s really time. The staging and the sale here. The search on the other end, in a city where I already know the good blocks and the right people. The landing, and the first few weeks after, when a person is standing in a new place, wondering if they made a terrible mistake. I’m there for that part too.

One move instead of two. Sell in Kalorama, land in Tampa. Leave a McLean house that’s grown too big, arrive in a New York apartment near the grandchildren — or in London, if that’s where the children are scattered. Same hands the whole way. No re-explaining your life to a new stranger at the worst possible moment.

That, increasingly, is the business I’m in. Not the buying and selling of houses — anyone with a license can do that — but the holding-together of a transition, end to end. The election may be what gets someone thinking. Health, age, family, the simple mathematics of too much house — that’s what actually moves them. And a broker who treats the entire journey as one job, across cities, is what makes the move bearable, sometimes even good.

Washington will change its mind again. It always does. The names on the doors will turn over, the moving trucks will line the streets of Georgetown and Kalorama like they do every couple of years, and a certain number of my neighbors will decide their story continues elsewhere.

When they do, they know where to find me. I am with them for the whole journey.

— Jim Bell,

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By Jim Bell | Billion Dollar Broker | May 15, 2026

A year ago, this market was holding its breath. DOGE, return-to-office whiplash, a January storm that pushed the season back three weeks. Everyone was waiting for someone else to flinch first.

This spring, the flinching stopped. It just didn’t happen evenly.

The number: DC closings jumped 30% from February to March. Five hundred homes citywide. Median days on market collapsed from 70 to 30 in a single month. That’s not a seasonal blip. That’s pent-up demand finally letting go.

Why it matters: The headline you keep reading — “DC is the only Mid-Atlantic market projected to soften in 2026” — is technically true and almost useless. Bright MLS has us at roughly -1% on the year against Philadelphia at +2.8% and Baltimore at +2.5%. Fine. But “DC” as a single market is a fiction. What’s actually happening is a sharper split than I’ve seen in fifteen years of selling here.

The split, in three lines:

• Chevy Chase, MD: up 74.4%, to $1,395,000

• Falls Church City, VA: up 35.3%, to $1,015,000

• Potomac: down 4.7%. Poolesville: down 22.3%

Same metro. Same week. Same rate environment. What separates those numbers isn’t macro. It’s micro — schools, walkability, embassy proximity, the kind of thing a spreadsheet never quite catches.

What I’m seeing: Georgetown, Kalorama, Wesley Heights, Spring Valley, the McLean estate corridor — cash share is running well above the national 26% average. These buyers aren’t rate-sensitive. They’re scarcity-sensitive. And the right houses are finally surfacing because life events — deaths, divorces, downsizes — overrode the rate-lock paralysis that froze most of last year.

One thing to be honest about: the condo market is a different conversation. Inventory is heavy, buyers are picky, and pricing has to be right on day one. There is no “let’s test the market” cushion left.

The London piece: I just got back from a week there, and the mood has shifted. Per FT reporting and the broader prime-market data, about 65% of London's super-prime sellers last year were non-doms exiting for Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Milan, Monaco, and Geneva. That outflow created the opening — and the value. Prime central London now sits roughly 24% below its 2014 peak in pounds. Deeper in dollars. The smart UK money is reading this as the entry window, not the exit, and inbound American interest is the clearest signal: US nationals now account for roughly a quarter of prime London purchases, with inquiries at an eight-year high. London isn't soft. London is on sale — and the buyers who recognize the difference are already moving.

The DC read: What global wealth now looks for in a second-residence city has shifted — political stability, rule of law, transparent title, and a discount to the obvious peers. DC fits that template, and we still trade at a real discount to both London and the Gulf. The Americans I sat with last week aren't selling DC to buy London. They're adding London as the hedge and keeping DC as the base. That's a flow this region hasn't historically had to think about. We will now.

What I’m watching through June:

• Whether March-to-April momentum holds into the close of spring

• Rates — consensus has the 30-year around 6.15% by year-end

• Federal employment news, which still moves this market more than anything else

• Whether some of the London non-doms start looking for a stable English-speaking base. Some of them will land here

Bottom line: “DC is soft” is the wrong frame. The right one: the prestige micro-markets are doing what they’ve always done — absorbing capital, holding value. The exurbs and parts of the condo market are paying the price for a federal-government story that hasn’t fully resolved. And the international layer on top of that is brand new. Most of the local commentary isn’t pricing it in yet.

The buyers came back. They just came back choosier — and from further away than before.

— Jim Bell is Executive Vice President of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty and publisher of Billion Dollar Broker.

Kalorama: 2200 Decatur Place NW — $2.7M, full price

In Kalorama, full price is not a rounding error. It’s a signal. Buyers at this level walked through, did the math on replacement cost versus resale, and moved. The embassy corridor doesn’t trade on sentiment. It trades on scarcity, privacy, and the quiet understanding that this block doesn’t come around often.

Langley Forest: 6929 River Oaks Drive — listed $3.5M, sold $3.7M with multiple offers

Langley Forest buyers want land, privacy, and a Virginia tax basis. When the right house hits, they compete for it. This one drew a crowd inside a week and closed $200,000 above list.

What both sales have in common: Speed

Under contract in seven days. Each.

The Washington Post ran a piece this month under the headline “High-end houses still competitive, even as luxury market slips a bit.” The top tier is not slipping. It’s sorting. Well-priced, well-positioned luxury is moving fast. Everything else is sitting.

The DMV numbers tell the broader story — average days on market around 45, inventory up roughly 40% from last year, and the bidding wars of 2024 largely gone. Except where they aren’t. They aren’t gone in Kalorama. They aren’t gone in Langley Forest. They aren’t gone anywhere the inventory is genuinely scarce and the house is genuinely right.

If you’re thinking about selling

The buyers are there. They are qualified, they are decisive, and they are writing.

What they will not do is tolerate a mispriced listing, a tired presentation, or a story that doesn’t hold together on the tour. The margin for error at $3M, $5M, $8M is smaller than it’s been in years. The reward for getting it right is a deal in a week.

If you’re weighing a sale in DC, McLean, or anywhere the luxury buyer is shopping, let’s talk before you list.

Jim Bell is Executive Vice President at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty and publisher of Billion Dollar Broker. Known professionally as The House Whisperer, he has closed more than $1.2 billion in transactions across 30+ years in the DMV market.

Contact Jim directly: JBell@TTRSIR.com (202)607-4000

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If you’ve ever sat at a closing table in Washington, DC, Maryland, or Virginia, you know the moment: the pens are out, the lender is ready, the buyer is excited—and then something small but consequential threatens to slow everything down. A missing payoff, an unresolved permit, a last-minute underwriting condition. In the DMV, real estate transactions don’t usually fail because of big, obvious problems. They get tripped up by quiet friction.

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Rates were falling. Inventory was rising. After two years of paralysis, buyers were starting to move. After years of sluggish sales, economists expected 2026 to bring lower mortgage rates and more homes for sale, breathing new life into a market where transactions had fallen to 30-year lows. CNN

Then the bombs dropped on Iran, and the spring window started to close.

What the War Did in Six Weeks

The day before U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began, the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage sat at 5.99%. CNBC That was a three-year low — a number that actually felt like the start of something. By early April, it had climbed to 6.46%, the highest level in seven months, and mortgage applications to purchase a home had dropped 3% in a single week while refinance applications fell 17%. CNN

In late February, just two days before the U.S. and Israel began joint strikes, the 30-year fixed rate dipped below 6% for the first time in more than three years. CNN That moment lasted about a week.

The mechanism is straightforward: war rattles bond markets, Treasury yields spike, and mortgage rates follow. Markets are now weighing whether higher oil prices could reignite inflation — which could lead the Federal Reserve to hold rates steady or even raise them. CNN On a $500,000 home with 20% down, a buyer who locked in a rate in February would save roughly $1,200 a year compared to someone closing at today’s rates. CNN Over 30 years, that’s real money.

Mortgage rates have now climbed five straight weeks since the war began. CNN The spring selling season — typically the year’s busiest — is running out of runway.

The Deeper Problem

Here’s what makes this moment different from a typical rate shock: the market was already wounded before the first missile launched.

New homes do not get built without construction financing, and current capital rules make many lenders reluctant to fund modestly priced for-sale housing. Acquisition, Development and Construction loans face punitive capital charges that make smaller, affordable projects uneconomic compared to higher-margin luxury development. National Housing Conference

That’s the structural rot underneath the rate headlines. Washington has spent years trying to solve a supply problem while quietly maintaining a regulatory framework that makes it harder to finance the very construction the country needs. Large institutional investors own roughly six-tenths of one percent of the nation’s single-family housing stock — yet Congress has been focused on limiting their role American Enterprise Institute rather than fixing the capital stack that keeps modest housing from being built at all.

In 39 states, nearly two-thirds of households can’t afford to buy a median-priced home in the community where they live. Governing A February 2026 Redfin survey found half of all Americans struggle to cover rent or mortgage payments. That was before rates climbed back above 6.4%.

The Catch-22 Nobody Wants to Name

The housing math has become almost absurd. According to Fannie Mae calculations, restoring affordability to 2016–2019 levels would require one of three things: median home prices falling 38%, median household incomes rising 60%, or mortgage rates falling to 2.35%. HousingWire

None of those scenarios is on the table.

What is on the table is geopolitical uncertainty layered on top of a financing environment that was already hostile to affordable-entry construction. The spring outlook has become “cloudier than it was even just a month ago,” according to BrightMLS chief economist Lisa Sturtevant. A prolonged conflict could stall home sales activity through the entire spring selling season. CNN

More than half of agents in a recent survey reported at least one contract cancellation. Of those who cited affordability as an issue, 19% said buyers had walked out of the market entirely — up from 11% at the end of last year. CNBC

The Window Is Still Open — Barely

The war-rate story isn’t necessarily a death sentence for the spring market. As Zillow senior economist Kara Ng put it: “If the situation resolves quickly, it’ll be early enough in the home shopping season for catch-up activity.” CNN But the longer the conflict drags — and with oil prices, inflation expectations, and Fed policy all now linked to events in the Middle East — the more buyers will push their plans to next season.

For sellers, that calculus cuts both ways. Inventory is rising in markets that haven’t seen meaningful supply in years. If rates ease and demand returns fast, the window will be competitive. If they don’t, sellers who priced for a rebound they assumed was coming may find themselves chasing a market that’s moved sideways.

What This Means for the DC Market

Washington insulates better than most. Government employment, law firm activity, lobbying, and defense contracting don’t evaporate in a rate shock. The Kalorama-to-McLean corridor still moves on life events — divorce, estate, relocation, job change — not just affordability calculations. Luxury buyers at the top of the market are rate-sensitive but not rate-dependent.

The pressure shows up in the middle. The $700K–$1.2M buyer — the move-up purchaser, the young partner, the dual-income federal couple — is exactly who stops at 6.4% when they were ready to move at 5.9%. That’s a 50-basis-point swing that shows up in canceled contracts and extended days on market.

The financing problem — the structural one, not the war-driven one — hits the entry-level new construction that feeds buyers into that move-up tier. Less supply at the bottom creates a logjam up the chain.

Two problems, then. One is the war and what it’s done to the bond market. One predates the war by years: a capital and regulatory environment that chills the construction the market desperately needs. The rate problem may resolve when the conflict does. The money problem has no such natural endpoint.

Jim Bell is Executive Vice President at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty and publisher of Billion Dollar Broker.

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