Oct 8, 2026 · @James bell
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.