DC Closings Are Up 30% This Spring. Here's What the Headlines Are Missing
What I Saw on the Ground This Spring — and What Just Changed in London.
The Spring DC Market Has a Pulse Again — Just Not Where Most People Are Looking
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.